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Date:Mon Jul 19 13:43:33 1993 
Subject:Re:quickie test 
From:jonr (Jonathan Rowe) 
Volume-ID:930719.05 


Robin Popplestone has a number of points:

a) I haven't read Schonfinkel [1922]
b) I look like a country bumkin
c) Are there a complete set of combinators for POP-11 for example, which
   conveniently exploit the stack?
d) the open stack and lack of type info. makes it easy to commit errors
e) we should be programming in another language, based on "stack grammars"

My answers are as follows:

a) is true
b) may well be true (though I was raised in London :-)

However, they are both irrelevant. If I asked the question "how do I reverse a
list in pop11" I expect the answer "see HELP rev" and not: "why haven't you
read Finkelshon[1878]? You have no right to ask until you do..."

c) A number of people have commented that the kind of thing I want to do
is impossible in pop11. If you don't think so, show me how. (It can be done
using pdnargs, as I did originally, but pdnargs is unreliable).

d) True. But we all live with that. My extension wouldn't make things
significantly worse. (This is my conjecture - find an example where it
would and I'll believe you).

e) Possibly true. But it seems odd to make your major contribution to a
newsgroup about pop11 the suggestion that we do something fundamentally
different instead. By the time you've written a compiler for it, it may well
be too late for what I want to do at the moment.


Jon Rowe

PS in case you missed out, I want the following:

   : [a], {% hd() %} =>
   ** {a}
   [a], [% hd() %] =>
   ** [b]

in order to implement a functional combinator & such that

    f & g means "g gets its arguments, f gets its arguments, f runs, g runs"