Re: [stack] Parameters: ordered versus named

On Sep 7, 2007, at 19:03 , William Tanksley, Jr wrote:

> Don Groves <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> The price we pay for the
>> simplicity of
>> concatenative syntax is the amount of parameter checking we must  
>> do at
>> run-time which other languages to at compile-time.
>
> Not true. Concatenative semantics don't require parameter passing, so
> there is nothing to do to parameters at runtime. There are, of course,
> other prices we must pay; but that's not one of them.

While it's true there's nothing to do "to" parameters, we still must  
check for
their existence, yes? If you want to trap stack underflow before it  
happens,
for example. And what do we do when a user enters a string and a number
then types "/"?


>> One beauty of concatenative notation is the hiding of information
>> such as described here,
>
> Nothing's hidden.
>
>> but we all know that hidden info must be dealt with
>> eventually,
>> unless the language is so primitive as to not care about these  
>> matters.
>
> But this is true. (Well, mostly -- Cat does type inferencing so you
> don't always have to describe the types, while Enchilada defines its
> semantics so that all its types are compatible.)

Afraid I'm confused here. You say nothing is hidden, yet you agree (at
least partially) with my next statement.

As always, any corrections or advice is greatly appreciated. I'm here to
learn! So don't take any questions or statements on my part as anything
other than trying to understand ;-)

> -Billy

--
Don Groves

PS - Anyone know why my posts are so jagged looking? When I send
them, they are evenly formatted. Could it be caused by my email program,
mail.app on OS X?