Re: [stack] the concatenative wikipedia article

Christopher Diggins <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 1. Concatenative should not be conflated with "stack-based". I have
>>> already shown that the counter-examples are beyond mere curiosities.
>> I'd like to see your examples, specifically emphasizing how you know
>> it's concatenative. I didn't notice them.

> Allow me to present the deque language that I just made up.
> 1! - Pushes a one to the right of the deque
> !1 - Pushes a one to the leftt of the deque
> add! - Adds the right two numbers of the deque
> !add - Adds the left two numbers of the deque
> ...

> 3! !5 !2 sub! !add
> If applied to an empty deque this will leave the value 4 on the deque.
> So is this a concatenative language? It satisfies many of the
> criteria, but I am not sure. If we could agree that this is or is not
> concatenative, it may prove useful.

By all three of the definitions I posted, as well as the Wikipedia one
(stripped of its parochial insistence on stacks), this qualifies. As a
bonus, my gut feeling is that it's concatenative. It's definitely more
complex than working with a stack, but there's nothing inherently
wrong about that -- and perhaps there's a data structure that's
inherently simpler than a stack.

OTOH, can a concatenative language ever be infix? I'd find it odd... A
fundamental property is syntactic associativity, and infix isn't
associative... Or can it be made so by means of currying?

> Agreed, I think there is value in refining the term concatenative.
> However, I think it is more important to define it here than somewhere
> else like a wiki where people with no knowledge of the subject can
> make arbitrary uninformed edits. Besides whatever is agreed upon in
> the list can serve as a source of citation for the Wikipedia article.

Granted, but a mailing list is ephemeral.

> - Christopher

-Wm