Re: [stack] language hierarchy

On Dec 11, 2007, at 5:58 PM, Stevan Apter wrote:

>> Is that true? Are the *rec functions especially good with
>> concatenative languages? (I don't know.) I'm sure they work with any
>> functional language...
>
> i've wondered about this for years.  at first glance, it seems like
> eliminating recursion in favor of *rec combinators would be as  
> fruitful
> as eliminating iteration in APL, J, K.

This is possible. At the moment, the plan is to see how well we can  
get on without them. The same goes for high-level programming in a  
linear language; it has nice benefits, including implementation  
simplicity and O(1) data structures without losing purity, but not  
having shared data might prove painful too often.

> it occurred to me more than once to try to map these patterns
> to manfred's joy recursion abstractions.  but i never did succeed in
> that effort.

I find that having types to guide you through the process makes it  
much easier. It can be quite tricky without them and often the result  
is tedious debugging. Then again, I personally think this extends to  
many aspects of programming in a stack-based language.

- John