Re: [stack] concatenativity and joy's non-opaque quotations

On Mar 31, 2008, at 9:53 AM, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

> But if you are not planning on allowing such
> manipulations in Fifth at runtime, making quotations lists doesn't
> have this advantage. Also, a particular macro system could be built to
> handle this, to turn quotations into a list at macro expand time.

This is the approach I'm taking.

> In practice, this issue with, I guess, impure concatenativity is
> never, ever, ever a problem, and to me it doesn't seem to be a
> particularly important theoretical problem either. It is, however,
> useful to give quotations and lists separate types (and keep
> quotations non-opaque), because then you can tell them apart whenever
> it's relevant for the type system to distinguish them.

I don't have much choice but to keep them separate. I toyed briefly  
with the idea of typing certain things as the intersection of their  
list and quotation types, but it doesn't seem particularly useful.  
Much cleaner to just deal with macros.

- John