Re: [stack] the concatenative wikipedia article

On Jan 1, 2009, at 6:09 PM, Robbert Dalen wrote:

> My (very broad) definition would be:
>
> 'A concatenative language is a language wherein syntactically valid
> expressions can be concatenated to yield syntactically valid
> expressions.'

This definition seems so broad as to have no useful consequences. At  
least Tanksley's associative requirement would allow factoring and  
some other basic forms of manipulation.

I think the thing to remember here is that we have things we want to  
describe and things we don't care to describe. Since the definition  
should be useful for our purposes, including a great number of things  
we don't care about as "concatenative" probably isn't the way to go.  
Getting away from having to say things like "a concatenative language  
where concatenation denotes function composition" is the point of this  
exercise in my opinion.

- John