Re: [stack] Parameters: ordered versus named

On 9/8/07, Don Groves <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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 "/"?

This is where a static type system with type inference comes in
useful. You can do all of this without annotation or runtime checks in
the compiler. See Cat (http://www.cat-language.com).

- Christopher