Re: [stack] Concatenative versus Compositionality

> Hi Chris,
>
> Yeah, this is true, but I don't see why we need to change the words.
> The use of the term "concatenative" is fairly well-established within
> our community,

The problem is that the computer science community is much larger than our own.

> and it's not unprecedented to have a term which does
> not specify all of what the constituent words mean.

Precedence does not make right.

> To take an example
> from the world of programming languages

Which is the only kind of language I am concerned with :-)

> (though the rest of English is
> full of them), consider the term 'object-oriented'.

A perfect example of what I am talking about. A term that was never
well-defined, and because it was too broad (it means literally "about
things") it got corrupted. Even members of the Scheme community have
been known to call Scheme object-oriented. Very few languages don't
consider themselves object-oriented.

> Admittedly, this  is not the most unambiguous term,
> but few people *wouldn't* call Smalltalk
> object-oriented.

Edited as per your later email.

> Yet Smalltalk programs do use objects: they
> manipulate functions, lists, tuples and other types of stuff, or
> objects.

Except it is nearly impossible to define object precisely.

> "Concatenative" itself doesn't explain what it means to be
> concatenative,

Yes.

> but the definition is now basically accepted that a
> concatenative language is one in which concatenation of two
> independent programs.

Within a very small community, and virtuallly no recognition from the
academic community.

> OK, so this isn't strictly true: we have to
> define a program such that "1 [ 2" is not a program (since [ isn't a
> program without a matching ]) and we have to account for side effects.
> But the essence, in my mind, has been that a concatenative language is
> one where programs are built from function composition, which is
> probably indicated through some extremely light-weight syntax like
> whitespace.
>
> Maybe "compositional" is a good way to explain concatenative
> languages, but the switch of terms would leave "concatenative" without
> a useful meaning. Referring only to syntax, it doesn't really define a
> class of semantically-related programming languages.

You are correct, it doesn't. Concatenative is a statement about
syntax, not semantics. A syntactic classification of languages could
still have use though.

> The end effect
> would be retiring the word "concatenative" in place of an equivalent
> term, "compositional".

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion yet.

> I hate to get myself into these definitional debates. If the consensus
> name is compositional, I will use that name to reduce ambiguity, but I
> fail to see the purpose in the switch. On the other hand,
> compositional is a word in my spell checker, unlike concatenative...
>
> Daniel Ehrenberg

Cheers,
Christopher