Re: [stack] Concatenative versus Compositionality

On Dec 3, 2007, at 19:11 , John Nowak wrote:

>
> On Dec 3, 2007, at 12:35 PM, Christopher Diggins wrote:
>
>> That doesn't quite characterize my reasoning. The fact that there is
>> uncertainty is not of concern to me. I am suggesting that the nature
>> of these languages is not the concatenativeness (lets define this as
>> meaning a language where whitespace corresponds to an operation)
>> ...
>>  What unifies the langauges
>> so far labelled as concatenative is that they are compositional
>> (whitespace denotes function composition).
>
> Just a quick point: I think those are overly narrow definitions of
> concatenativity and compositionality if you include anything about
> "whitespace". Imagine a language where functions aren't entered as
> individual characters and concatenated via whitespace, but rather
> dragged off a palette of predefined functions and connected together
> like a jigsaw puzzle.  MIT's Scratch is works somewhat along these
> lines -- in fact, I've seen it described at least once as a
> "concatenative language for children":
>
> http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects/scratch/help/images/variableSet.gif
>
> It is easy to imagine Joy with a similar sort of graphical syntax;
> Quotation would work as the "forever" does in that example (albeit
> with the addition of an output like the other functions have).
>
> - John

We could also define a language with single character names wherein
xfg would mean g(f(x)) with no whitespace involved. Being a big fan of
conciseness, this is on my list of ideas for experimentation ;-)
--
Don



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