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

howzabout writing up a spec for your proposed language?  it would be
handy to have it all in a single doc, instead of spread over several
weeks of emails.  i thought you'd written up a wiki somewhere, but
i haven't been able to locate it.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Nowak" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 5:20 PM
Subject: Re: [stack] Advantages of cat, joy ..?


> 
> On Feb 24, 2009, at 5:08 PM, John Nowak wrote:
> 
> Minor corrections, sorry.
> 
>> This  is because the entire state of the program is passed to every  
>> function
>> and you need to "tell" the cleave how many items it cases about.
> 
> That should be "cares about". In other words, you need cleave,  
> 2cleave, 3cleave, etc in Joy. You don't need this in FP.
> 
>> (Note that Backus's FP is a different here: '~1' denotes the function
>> that returns the value 1 and '1' denotes the value one. I dislike this
>> as it is incompatible with the property of concatenative languages
>> where the simplification of a function is another function. This is
>> why I've adopted the approach of having '1' represent a constant
>> function.)
> 
> Simplification is the wrong word here. I really mean a partial  
> reduction or something to that effect. For example, in Joy, the  
> function '1 2 + 3 +' can be partially reduced to the function '3 3 +'.  
> The small change I'm making to the syntax of FP ensures this same sort  
> of property holds there as well. For example, the function '+[+[1, 2],  
> 3]' can be partially reduced to the function '+[3, 3]', which can then  
> be further reduced to the function '6'.
> 
> - John
>