Re: [stack] Thread, a vaguely related query language (and hello!)

chris glur <[email protected]> wrote:
> The reason why factor and other new-fad languages put the <IF ID> at the end, is

Guys, it's official: concatenative languages have hit the big-time.
We're a fad now! :-)

> Although it's never stated, I suspect the apparent 'visual compactness' makes
> many of these <the programmer does half the compiler's job>/languages>
> attractive.

Check out Arc, Paul Graham's language at
http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html. He clearly and explicitly states
that compactness is a primary measure of the power of a programming
language. The APL people said that long ago --- they actually decided
to give up almost all maintainability in return for extreme terseness,
with the assumption that a new maintenance programmer would have to
normally rewrite a function from its design and/or specification in
order to modify it. But since a function is normally a single line
long, that's not THAT bad.

Concatenative languages, in my experience, don't tend to take a hard
position on the terseness scale. Some of them, like Forth, have some
communities that strongly emphasize terseness (Chuck Moore's 1xForth);
others look at more variables.

> Provided programming is still done by entering chars, this argument has merit.
> IMO the <IfThenElse> construct should just be selected off a menu, and

You're overlooking the advantage of being able to SEE more of your
program. (Menus have their own tradeoffs, plusses and minuses; but I
tend to agree that as far as function names go, we have good solutions
like autocomplete that do the job.)

> Apparently factor was started as a scripting-language.

You could look at its history (and see that it wasn't).

> == Chris Glur.

-Wm