Re: [stack] Cat article submission to Doctor Dobbs Journal

Hi William,

Thanks. I've responded to your comments below and already started
tweaking the article as per your suggestions.

On Feb 10, 2008 2:19 AM, William Tanksley, Jr <[email protected]> wrote:
> > For the time being I have been contracted to provide Doctor Dobbs with
> > an article about Cat. I talk quite a bit about Joy and concatenative
> > languages in general. It is due Monday, but if anyone has time to
>
> Congrats!

Thanks.

> Tell me which month so I can read it in print!

I can't say yet, I'll let you know as soon as I know.

> Some notes:
>
> What is the [?] in "...very easy to create efficient implementations for
> [?],"?

Reference place holders. Changed it to [ref]

> The phrase "upon which Manfred von Thun, based the Joy language"
> shouldn't have a comma.
>
> Now I find a real disagreement. First-class functions aren't at all
> part of the definition of "concatenative"

My bad, I didn't mean to imply that. They are key to why Joy is so
interesting (to me at least) though.

> nor are branch statements
> antithetical to concatenativity.

I really didn't mean to imply that one neither. My point was that the
fact that Manfred leaving branch  statements (by which I mean goto
statements) out was significant (is that contentious?). I wasnt trying
to say anything there about concatenative languages in general. I've
tried to clarify.

>Manfred's major innovation was to
> introduce and extensively use function literals, which are similar to
> lambdas in other functional languages;  this innovation allowed Joy to
> be analyzed in much the same way as other functional languages. I'd
> really appreciate it if you'd alter this part of the article, if at
> all possible; the definition of "concatenative" may not be perfect,
> but it's FAR sharper than this.
>
> A possible replacement:
>
> "Manfred's primary innovation with Joy was to introduce first class
> functions and function literals (called quotations). The resulting
> language shares many of the advantages of functional languages (e.g.
> it is easy to reason about) and is particularly expressive."

I like that, but the goto removal is significant, and should be left
because with gotos you wouldn't have the nice rewriting properties
that you have now.

> Unfortunately, this removes all mention of "concatenative" from your
> article, but since you didn't really discuss it I don't think it's a
> loss. I do think you could be more precise than "is particularly
> expressive", though... I'm not sure what you mean by it, although it
> looks like a compliment :-).

By expressive I meant that we can say a lot with a little. (e.g. a few
instructions can convey a sophisticated concept). I've tried to
rephrase.

> Minor style note: "using the higher-order functions apply, if, while,
> etc." Using "etc" is not optimal; try "using higher-order functions
> such as apply, if, and while."

Good point.

> ...I just got handed the baby. No more time! :-)
>
> -Wm

I look forward to more of your comments, thanks!

Gotta go to bed now,
- Christopher