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

i'm not following this.

a list has an order but you can ignore it.

in k at least, you can build a "map", e.g.
    
    v:`x`y`z!10 20 10

so v.x = 10, v.y=20, &c.  of course the components of v
are stored in *some* order, but the important point for
this discussion is that v is passed around as a unitary
whole and values are accessed by name.  i believe that
linda behaves this way as well -- all functions are unary
taking and returning tuples.  any language that has
association lists (symbol-value pairs) should give you
the same facility (lisp, &c.)

what am i missing?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "William Tanksley, Jr" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2007 5:24 PM
Subject: 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
>