Re: [stack] sweetening concatenative syntax

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Diggins" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 10:40 AM
Subject: 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.

i understand, although for various reasons i am not one of those users.
mainly though, it seems to me that most of the programming errors i make
are not the kind that would be caught by static type-checking.

over the years i've come to believe that simplicity and low code-mass 
in the language implementation is the best way to reduce the worst kind
of errors in end-user code.  i can't help but notice how frequently haskell
and ocaml programmers (at least, those without black-belts) struggle with
their respective type-systems.  the ramification of type-theories into 
so many alternative approaches alone should indicate that something is
amiss.  

> 
>> 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.

excelsior.

> 
> - Christopher
>