Re: [stack] Re: Jon Purdy: Why Concatenative Programming Matters

Robbert van Dalen <[email protected]> wrote:
> i still remember the days when basicode programs were broadcasted!
> you could actually hear the 0's and 1's.

Wow, that's something. I remember typing in BASIC programs from
magazines, but I'd never heard of that.

> Seriously, i do want to hear about your zeroone language!
> what's morphing?

Oh, I'd mentioned that "my zeroone language was morphing" -- I meant
it's been changing. The internal changes are big enough that my main
copy doesn't currently work :-), and at the same time I'm playing with
some theoretical ideas that might possibly make it easier to construct
new bases for the language. Good thing I'm using version control.

I've got a few more things to do today, so I can't post much more; but
anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about when I say "new bases"
should start reading http://tunes.org/~iepos/joy.html. What you should
try to understand is his sentence: "The eight combinators presented
above are by no means all of the combinators; there are infinitely
many combinators. However, eventually we'll show that from the above
combinators, it is possible to construct all other combinators. In
fact, it will turn out that there is a base consisting of just two
combinators, from which all other combinators can be constructed."

Once that sentence makes some sense to you we're ready to go. You
won't have to understand how to construct combinators; you'll only
need to understand the basic ideas behind that sentence: combinators,
a base consisting of a number of combinators, and the concept that
combinators can be used to construct other combinators.

> i'm experimenting with a combination of datalog, the chemical abstract machine and constraint handling rules with postfix syntax.
> nothing concrete yet, but i believe that (syntactic) postfix expressions match (reactive) molecules, whatever that means.

Wow, that's cool. I've always wanted to experiment with chemical
abstract machines, but my employer does random testing. Ha hah.
Seriously, though, I read up on CAMs; sounds right up your alley (from
your work with the Enchilada language), as it would fit nicely on
highly parallel machines. I'd like to hear more.

> R.

-Wm