[stack] Re: Concatenative Research

--- In [email protected], John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
>
> Justin scripsit:
> 
> > Agreed! Quotations should be opaque, functions should be unable to
> > gauge the depth of the stack, and functions should be unable to discern
> > anything about the parts of the program following them.
> 
> *sigh*
> 
> The minute anyone gets a hold of the Joy model, the first thing they ditch
> is the beautiful code/data duality.  It is IMHO part of the essence of
> Joy that you construct lists-as-code with the same mechanisms you use
> to construct lists of any sort, and the stack is just another list.
> (Lisp/Scheme tries to allow the former, but issues around lexical scope
> make it impossible in the general case: syntax objects are not lists
> and symbols.)  Sacrificing that beauty to the fashionable model of static
> typing strikes me as just sad.

The code/data duality isn't being sacrificed on the altar of static typing; it's being sacrificed in the name of algebraic reasoning about programs. The ability to reason about how your code behaves comes not from what your language can do, but from what it can't. That being said, why not have both lists and quotations, and allow lists to be converted into quotations?