On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 12:38 AM, john skaller <
skal...@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
> On 26/12/2012, at 5:01 PM, Dobes Vandermeer wrote:
>
> > I think the #true thing is not bad. It may be worth considering
> treating special cases like that as if "true" were a boolean literal rather
> than an identifier, and doesn't require a parameter.
>
> true already is a boolean literal: the *parser* translates it to
>
> case 1 of 2
>
> which is a literal value of a sum type. The problem is its an
> argument-less sum type.
>
> Now actually this idea has GREAT MERIT. In Haskell it is called
> point free programming, in my terms it is categorical programming:
>
> Composition is cool because it is an associative operator: application
> is not. Application sucks because when you have values you have
> to abstract them, and so you need lambda binders. Which suck.
>
At least some people are calling this "concatenative programming" :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenative_programming_language
http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.ca/2012/02/why-concatenative-programming-matters.html
Just in case you ever decide to adopt others' terms for things :-)
All that crud goes away when you use composition
> (but of course you get new crud instead ;) :)
>
It seems like you end up programming in a sort of "stack machine" mode, or
similar.
I do think it's useful to have a way to write programs in a concatenative
manner. Something like:
process(f) ... readFile ... breakIntoLines ... processLinesToAst ...
Is often nicer than:
processLines(breakIntoLines(readFile(f)))
I don't think a purely concatenative language would be friendly enough; it
can be hard to mentally process all the steps and "point free" programming
is concise but the lack of named parameters usually makes the code harder
to read.
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