Re: [stack] the concatenative wikipedia article

--- In [email protected], "William Tanksley, Jr"
<wtanksleyjr@...> wrote:
>
> John Nowak <john@...> wrote:
> > William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
> >> The minimal basis for applicative languages contains one combinator;
> >> the minimal basis for concatenative languages contains two
> >> (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=967781.967785 has a proof).
> 
> > This doesn't seem to be the case for a concatenative language with
> > quotation (push). Okasaki is dealing with the additional limitation of
> > "flatness". I suppose you could count quotation as a combinator of
> > sorts, but in either case it's a very simple operation.
> 
> I have to blush -- I'd forgotten that part. Yes, you're right; I was
> thinking of a purely concatenative language, one with no
> non-associative syntax at all (AKA "flat"). Quotation is a strange
> thing to throw into an allegedly concatenative combinator base,
> though; unlike application, it's not an inherent part of the language
> paradigm; thus, I think my confusion is justified.

Well, where does Furphy fit in this breakdown?
(http://users.beagle.com.au/peterl/furphy.html)

Although it does have quotation, as I mentioned elsewhere that's just
syntactic sugar. The fundamental constructs are Reverse Polish naming
and concatenation, which can use the complementary keywords FREEZE and
THAW to defer and invoke evaluation/execution - and those can be built
from the return stack manipulation keywords R> and >R already found in
Forth. That looks fairly associative/flat to me.