Re: [stack] Notation for typed arrays in Cat

On 10/4/08 1:00 PM, "Christopher Diggins" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 3:44 AM, Manfred Von Thun
> <[email protected] <mailto:m.vonthun%40latrobe.edu.au> > wrote:
> 
>> > Now the marvellous bit: given the definition foo == bar baz zot, where bar
>> > baz zot are primitives or have been previously defined, Prolog
>> automatically
>> > works out the input and output stacks for foo. I did not have to write any
>> > code for this, in fact it took me some time to notice that Prolog had done
>> > it. Such is the power of unification.
> 
> Your approach to directly expose Prolog as the language for expressing
> type is elegant and very powerful. My only hesitation is the syntax of
> prolog, which may be accessible to a logician, are not great for
> someone with only some collegial level math. In general the problem I
> am having is with constructing an accessible syntax for people.
> 
That would not a problem at all.
The idea is that the implementation uses this notation internally, either
because the whole implementation is in Prolog or because it
uses a subset of Prolog to define the primitives. But the end-users
never see the Prolog at all, they just see a concatenative language.
When they define foo == bar baz zot, the unifier works out the input
and the output stacks, and possibly provide an error message when
there is a mismatch.  So the end-users should never see the Prolog.

  - Manfred



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