Re: [stack] impure concatenativity: let without translation

....snip...
> There is. Special forms and macros need access to the entire tree to
> do their work. If you were to put 'define' at the end, then there's no
> way for it to act on the tree (without some bizarre backtracking).

Actually post script does:
/inc3 { 3 add } def

(and so does V :) )

I think the reverse is true, it is harder to go against the flow
when you are using postfix and give special treatment to syntactic markers
like define/let etc.

> Keep in mind that even [a b c] is really (lambda () a b c). Putting
> meta-level things like 'define' and 'let' up front also aids in
> readability.

not entirely. '[a b c]' is really '<quote literal> lambda' :)

On the second point, on One-sentence defitions (like the above) I find
the postfix define easier to parse visually. - I guess it boils down to
a matter of taste.

>> Naive question: Is there any reason why concatenative languages are
>> (uniformly) postfix?  Would prefix work just as well, pushing
>> elements onto
>> the stack from right to left?
>
> Let's say these two are equivalent:
>
>     -- postfix
>     hypot -> sqr swap sqr + sqrt
>
>     -- prefix
>     sqrt + sqr swap sqr <- hypot
>
> Sure, both mean the same thing, but which is easier to read (provided
> you're used to reading left to right)?

--

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