Ah -- concatenative languages, yes. I'm becoming a big fan of simple token-based concatenative languages. See my summary here of my recent travails: http://fexl.com/second_thoughts .
In short, instead of Fexl I've started using a simple token-based language. Like Joy, my token-based language uses a stack. But my language also uses a global mutable key-value space, and it only supports keys and values which are strings (which may be interpreted as numbers).
I think my little language is easier to "execute" manually on a white-board in a way that's easy for non-programmers to follow along. I don't need a lot of arcane "stack flip-aroo" operators like Forth and Joy use.
So how do I do a sort you ask? I just jam a bunch of keys into the key-value space and then use "next" to iterate through them. The key-value space does the sorting for me.
What about strictly sequential lists you ask? I can just store a bunch of keys using a scheme like this:
By prefixing a single character which represents the number of digits, I get the proper numerical order when I iterate in ASCII character order.
You know what my real goal is? I want to be able to give my non-programmer colleagues the ability to embed little snippets of computation here and there, making simple things simple, but also imposing no upper bound on the possibilities of what they might do.
Comments
Ah -- concatenative languages, yes. I'm becoming a big fan of simple token-based concatenative languages. See my summary here of my recent travails: http://fexl.com/second_thoughts .
In short, instead of Fexl I've started using a simple token-based language. Like Joy, my token-based language uses a stack. But my language also uses a global mutable key-value space, and it only supports keys and values which are strings (which may be interpreted as numbers).
I think my little language is easier to "execute" manually on a white-board in a way that's easy for non-programmers to follow along. I don't need a lot of arcane "stack flip-aroo" operators like Forth and Joy use.
So how do I do a sort you ask? I just jam a bunch of keys into the key-value space and then use "next" to iterate through them. The key-value space does the sorting for me.
What about strictly sequential lists you ask? I can just store a bunch of keys using a scheme like this:
By prefixing a single character which represents the number of digits, I get the proper numerical order when I iterate in ASCII character order.You know what my real goal is? I want to be able to give my non-programmer colleagues the ability to embed little snippets of computation here and there, making simple things simple, but also imposing no upper bound on the possibilities of what they might do.