Re: [stack] disallowing recursive definitions

On 20/3/08 6:47 AM, "William Tanksley, Jr" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Manfred Von Thun <[email protected] <mailto:m.vonthun%40latrobe.edu.au>
> > wrote:
>> >  The upshot: have we in the concatenative world missed out
>> >  on something useful by not allowing parts to the smallest
>> >  programs. There is a lot one could and should discuss here,
>> >  but not me, not tonight.
> 
> We do already do that. All concatenative languages (except 01 :-)
> support numbers, which are molecules by your definition. Most support
> strings. Joy quotations are molecules whose component parts happen to
> be a proper subset of Joy itself.

No, I mean something quite different. I did not mean that a molecule
consists
of consecutive digits (as do numerals) or of other printing characters
(as do most symbols). Nor do I mean strings or quotations (including lists).
Using the terminology of the grammar of Joy, all of the above are factors,
resulting in a single operation being performed on the stack. My analogy
was with Unix pipes. Here each command (a molecule in my meaning)
might consist of a primary command (an atom in my meaning)) together with
any (often optional) additional atoms. Some of these are additional
parameters,
some of these are command modifiers. None of these is a command
by itself. The Unix pipe is a concatenation of such molecules.

  - Manfred 



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