Re: [stack] the concatenative wikipedia article

On Jan 1, 2009, at 7:10 PM, William Tanksley, Jr wrote:

>> I agree that the associative property of function composition drives
>> some of the interesting characteristics of the class of languages,  
>> but
>> I think this is not necessary in the formal definition, but is a
>> statement about why we are interested.
>
> Logically speaking, it is necessary; you're implying below that it's
> not sufficient. It's kind of nice to have the definition touch on one
> of the main interesting properties of the language being defined,
> don't you think?
>
> It's worth mentioning that Nowak's original language wasn't
> concatenative because it isn't associative; it actually DOES use
> composition.

I think the actual problem was that the juxtaposition of two functions  
denoted composition, but the juxtaposition of three functions denoted  
composition and construction.

Did you have something in mind where concatenation solely means  
composition but somehow isn't associative? I'm not sure how this could  
be possible unless the operation wasn't actually function composition.  
Perhaps I'm not understanding you correctly.

- John