Re: [stack] disallowing recursive definitions

On Mar 6, 2008, at 10:23 AM, William Tanksley, Jr wrote:

> John Nowak <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Indeed, and I'd argue that this is exactly why many people find  
>> stack-
>> based languages universally problematic. They're taking issue with  
>> all
>> of this state passing, although they phrase it like "I can't keep the
>> stack in my head". Of course this isn't a problem in practice,
>> particularly when you have type inference involved and can get a  
>> quick
>> summary of what a function cares about, but it does seem to be the
>> source of many negative first impressions.
>
> Now we're treading on the marshy ground of subjective judgments... I
> don't think we're going to resolve this in this manner.

Resolve what? Are you talking to the right John?

> But I wasn't talking about subjective impressions; I'm talking about
> mathematical analysis. We don't need to go into opinions.
> Mathematically, every operation in a concatenative language is modeled
> by passing the entire stack to each successive function, and yet the
> mathematical analysis is exceedingly simple.

I agree.

> Therefore, if tail-calls are hard to analyze in a concatenative
> language, the problem is NOT that "the entire stack is being passed".
> The problem lies elsewhere.

Of course.

> Let me quote you: "No.  All you do is do an arbitrary stack shuffle
> before the tail call."

Ah, now I'm sure you have the wrong John. I'm Mr. Nowak, he's Mr. Cowan.

- John