Re: [stack] the concatenative wikipedia article

On Dec 31, 2008, at 2:34 PM, Christopher Diggins wrote:

>>> 1. Concatenative should not be conflated with "stack-based". I have
>>> already shown that the counter-examples are beyond mere curiosities.
>>
>> Agreed entirely.
>>
>> 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.
> ...
> So is this a concatenative language?

Looks like it to me.

The question is, which criteria would it *not* satisfy? I can't think  
of any unless you restrict the forms of the language to composition  
and quotation. Such a restriction would admit all current  
"concatenative" languages but rule out things like language you  
proposed (due to the '!' form) and the recent things I've been  
proposing that use construction.

If that were the case, we could refer to concatenative languages as  
the subset of compositional languages (i.e. languages that use  
composition instead of application) that have quotation and  
composition as their only program forming operations. I seem to recall  
proposing this definition awhile back.

One issue with this definition is that Forth doesn't qualify as it  
doesn't offer quotation. My proposed second-order 5th wouldn't qualify  
either as it doesn't offer quotation and defines new combinators in  
terms of (statically reducible) substitution. As my gut tells me that  
both Forth and 5th should count, I think the composition+quotation  
restriction may be too severe. You can't argue with the gut after all.

- John