Re: [stack] Parameters: ordered versus named

On Sep 8, 2007, at 19:55 , Christopher Diggins wrote:

> 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

Thanks, I'll study what you've done with Cat.
--
Don