Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?

On Feb 18, 2009, at 6:50 PM, William Tanksley wrote:

> Nesting gets in the way... But not being able to quickly notate  
> nesting
> gets in the way, too. I've never figured out how to implement a
> completely flat language that's any fun to program in.

I agree. I wouldn't suggest doing away with this. To be clear, what I  
was suggesting was only allowing nesting that is statically removable  
(with the exception of some primitives like 'if' and 'dip').

> But I'm now as certain as I can be that associativity is the heart of
> why concatenative languages are generally easy to analyse. The more  
> your
> language allows that, the more "concatenative" people will tend to  
> think
> it is.

This is a very good observation, and I'd agree. The reason my FP-like  
experiments didn't feel concatenative was that each function "chain"  
was only about two or three functions long; there wasn't much you  
could do in terms of associative operations.

> Your second order ideas look very interesting, actually. Have you  
> taken
> a break on working with it -- I haven't heard anything... ?

Been busy trying to make money to feed myself unfortunately. Hopefully  
I'll be back to work on more interesting things soon.

- John