Re: [stack] Re: Some thoughts on Object Cat

On Apr 23, 2008, at 5:10 AM, Manfred Von Thun wrote:

> In Joy at least, the i combinator does not mean application. Joy is a
> concatenative language, not an applicative language. The applicative
> languages are the lambda calculus and the combinatory calculus,
> together with their descendents – just about all programming languages
> descend from the lambda calculus. All applicative languages  have an
> apply operation: apply this function to those arguments, but mostly  
> there
> is no explicit symbol for that operation. Joy does not have such an
> operation neither explicit nor implicit.

Are concatenative languages not just a particular kind of applicative  
language? It seems to me that there's no real difference between this:

    foo = 1 2 + *

And this (where '1' and '2' are functions of type 'A -> A Num' as  
above):

    foo stack = * (+ (2 (1 stack)))

Of course, because Joy is a restricted form of applicative language,  
you can reason about things in ways you can't in the general case.  
Perhaps there's something more fundamental I'm missing here that makes  
Joy non-applicative.

- John
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