Re: [stack] EWD 28: Djikstra's sort-of-concatenative language

On 31/7/07 9:33 AM, "kuwabatake" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I find Djikstra's writings very interesting, and I stumbled on this:
> 
> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD00xx/EWD28.html
> 
> In the (short) paper, Djikstra describes a stack-based arithmetic
> language. [..]
> 
A fascinating paper indeed. Thank you for sharing it with us. And to think
that the concatenative world only discovered it now! We should have
stumbled upon it much earlier.
> 
> [..]
> In short: how about a language in which every word puts itself onto
> the stack, except for the `special' word i, which executes the
> function on top of the stack?
> 
I have toyed with this idea several times. We have also discussed it on
the group ‹ can anybody remember when? But I have never been
convinced of its utility, except for theoretical purposes. However,
Stephan Apter has used it in one of his languages, see his previous
post.

Only distantly related, the language of foyers that I invented trying
(but failing) to persuade Billy that flatness is in the eye of the beholder.
That was about 6 (?) months ago. There I had a stack of queues;
input (like 2 3 +) from the scanner was appended to the top queue;
the contents of the top queue could be executed by a final period.
> 
Thanks for that

  - Manfred



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