Re: [stack] the concatenative wikipedia article

i've stayed out of this wrangle.  i've fallen into the habit of
using/interpreting "concatenative" to mean nothing more than 
"joy-like."  if someone claims that L is concatenative, and L
doesn't look like joy, then i look for an argument which connects
L in some non-obvious way with joy.

but now i think that robbert is correct.  "concatenative" is
purely syntactic, and picks out just those languages where
concatenation is used to make wfes from wfes.  at any rate,
that seems to match my "pre-theoretical" use of the term.

and that reminds me:  robbert, can we have a status update on
enchilada?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Nowak" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 7:31 PM
Subject: 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
>