Re: [stack] sweetening concatenative syntax

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 10:11 AM, Stevan Apter <[email protected]> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Nowak" <[email protected]>
> To: <[email protected]>
> Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 6:38 PM
> Subject: Re: [stack] sweetening concatenative syntax
>
> >
> > On Mar 6, 2008, at 6:12 PM, Stevan Apter wrote:
> >
> >> forget about the partial application case. what i want in my toolkit
> >> is a single combinator 'map' which takes an n-ary function and applies
> >> it to each of a list of length-n lists.
> >
> > Ah, I think maybe there's some confusion here over what we mean by
> > "list". (Yes, really!) In Joy, lists, stacks, and functions are all
> > magically the same thing. I assume it's similar in XY as well. In
> > Fifth, lists, stacks, and functions are all different things. This is
> > just one more example of the endless complication that types introduce.

Well you can design a statically language that makes a list synonymous
with the function that generates it. In other words: lists are
functions. I have been experimenting with this approach in Cat, and it
seems to work well.

> this is the sort of thing that makes me type-averse. i understand that
> proponents of types have their reasons, but i can't help thinking that it's
> one of those things that language-designers like more than language-users.

Many language users like static type systems because it means that a
huge chunk of program verification can be done at compile-time. In
other words faster debugging.

> one of the beauties of joy is that quotations are lists are programs, and
> in some variants, are stacks.

Yes I agree.

> is there really no way to reconcile typing with this elegant simplification?

I believe we can.

- Christopher