Re: [stack] disallowing recursive definitions

On Mar 3, 2008, at 8:38 PM, Don Groves wrote:

> A few months back, I finally caught on to this: by their nature,
> concatenative languages enforce computation by continuation
> passing.

Indeed. This in *incredibly* useful as it means your language is  
essentially purely functional by default. After all, it's trivial to  
thread a world state through the entire program on the top of the  
stack. All you need then is a simple effect system to allow enforcing  
of purity (purity = does not read/write the world value) via the type  
system when desirable/necessary. The monoidal nature of Joy-like  
languages also enables linearity without linear/uniquneness types. Cat  
takes advantage of this, although perhaps not originally knowingly.  
Fifth does as well.

- John