Re: [stack] sweetening concatenative syntax

John Nowak <[email protected]> wrote:
>  William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
>  > ...but you're still doing patternmatching. Aren't you? What am I
>  > missing?
>  'unlist' is just a normal function that gets defined as a result of
>  declaring the 'list' data type:
>     unlist :: A {b} [A -> C] [A b {b} -> C] -> C

Sorry, I have no idea how to read this. It's clearly a type signature,
but I don't know any such languages more recent than ML (well, I know
a little Scala), and that only from a few college assignments.

I assumed that it was somewhat like 'i' in Joy (due to the name
'unlist' being similar to Joy's technical term 'dequote').

>  This is different from general pattern matching as there's no way to
>  match on particular values and "matching" here is guaranteed to be
>  constant time.

Okay. I don't know of any pattern matching that doesn't work this way
(my knowledge of the modern functional languages is highly pathetic).

> Alternatively, it isn't pattern matching as it doesn't
>  involve patterns. The fact that it *looks* like pattern matching when
>  lambda expressions are used is a very nice thing.

Okay. I don't know what your example meant, then. Suffice it to say
that I'm just plain confused.

>  - John

-Wm