Re: [stack] the concatenative wikipedia article

On Jan 1, 2009, at 1:37 AM, William Tanksley, Jr wrote:

> I do suspect that the definition might be a little improved by
> hybridizing it with your newest one, perhaps something like this:
>
> "A concatenative programming language is language in which terms
> correspond to functions and in which the juxtaposition of terms
> denotes an associative operation on functions."
>
> Is it TOO general? It seems to me to cover all the cases, even the
> non-interesting ones (such as where the operation is multiplication).

I'd say yes. Ideally, we'd like to be both clear *and* precise. I  
think such a definition would satisfy the first requirement (it's  
clear) but not the latter (it's too broad to be useful). It might be  
worth considering if we had some other interesting associative  
operations to base a programming language on, but I (thankfully) can't  
think of any.

- John