PostScript Ideas Worth Resurrecting

From	Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.postscript
Subject	PostScript Ideas Worth Resurrecting
Date	2024-03-03 05:42 +0000
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<us12kp$2bna6$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)

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PostScript, both as a language and as a graphics API, are just museum 
pieces now.

Nevertheless, there were some interesting ideas in the language part, that 
are still worth looking at. For example, executable arrays are basically 
functions as first-class objects. This is key to implementing control 
constructs (both conditional and looping) as straight built-in functions, 
with no special syntax of their own.

But these “function” objects do have some deficiencies: no (simple) 
support for reentrant local variables, and no lexical binding. Fix these 
up, and you have a much more useful language.

I have been playing off and on with a toy implementation of a PostScript 
variant with these characteristics. While I was at it, I added some stack-
safety features to try to make stack-based programming less confusing and 
error-prone.

I also got as far as implementing Python-style generator functions. But I 
think I might replace that in favour of something more ambitious, namely 
Scheme-style continuations.

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PostScript Ideas Worth Resurrecting Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2024-03-03 05:42 +0000
  Re: PostScript Ideas Worth Resurrecting David Newall <ghostscript@davidnewall.com> - 2024-03-26 16:11 +1100
    Re: PostScript Ideas Worth Resurrecting Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2024-03-26 06:19 +0000
      Re: PostScript Ideas Worth Resurrecting Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2024-03-26 20:15 +0000

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