Re: [stack] Why is point-free form so interesting?

John Carter <[email protected]> wrote:
> William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
> > Array dataflow languages are perhaps our best bet. But not any of the
> > existing ones, I think. I speculate that we want a stack language with
> > a very powerful array-building (or multiset-building) sublanguage, so
> > that independent dataflows can be elegantly gathered together into a
> > single stack element.

> Do you have some URL's for those languages? I can't seem to lay my
> Googly fingers on them.

NIAL is the open source one; APL, J, and K are to one extent or
another proprietary. I think K and NIAL are the best bets; J is good,
but K is more flexible with nested arrays.

http://www.nial.com/OpenSource.html

The manual is reasonably informative, although not as good as all the
J documentation.

None of them have multisets, which I'm starting to think may be
semantically important for true out-of-order dataflow. It's fine to
imagine that an array iteration is order-independent, but arrays are
actually ordered.

> I'm also brewing something that is looking fun.

You'll certainly beat me to the punch -- I'm about to start working on
earning a Master's degree for which my company surprised me with a
full scholarship (!).

But that's my excuse today. I didn't have that excuse a year ago, and
I've still managed to produce nothing :-(. :-)

> I love these languages they are so simple, you can do profound changes
> to the semantics and still make progress in short order.

Yes! It's also nice to be working in an almost untouched field (almost
every discovery is new), yet still with geniuses on whose shoulders to
stand.

> John Carter                             Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639

-Billy