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Re: CfV: Quotations

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Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> writes:
>anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes:
>> I expect quotations to become CORE EXT
>
>Hmm, that surprises me a bit, since quotations seem like an esoteric
>feature for most Forth users.

CORE EXT is the typical place for things that do not belong anywhere
else.  Another place might be TOOLS EXT, but looking at 15.1 and
15.6.1, I don't think that's the right place (but the same could be
said of a number of things in TOOLS EXT; e.g., AHEAD, CODE, ;CODE
etc. are not just used during development, but also in the finished
applications.

Anyway, if we put it in TOOLS EXT, you can still have a standard
system with quotations and without locals.

>> 2e 0e v vlen [: ( rexp racc r -- rexp racc1 ) 2 fpick f** f+ :] fmap
>
>> Bernd Paysan thinks that's good enough.  I am not sure.  Especially
>> when working with several HOFs at once, it becomes hard to follow what
>> happens on the stack.  Or maybe it's just that we are not used to
>> dealing with that.
>
>That example is readable but yes, it does get worse with deeper levels
>of HOF.  Witness Haskell vs Python: the languages have similar raw
>capabilities, but Haskell uses HOFs more freely because its type system
>keeps them from getting out of control.

I think that the tendency of Haskell to use currying (coming from the
syntax) plays a bigger role, as well as the culture of functional
programming.

>I think that Forthers generally don't want to use so much abstraction so
>maybe it won't be an issue.  In fact I wonder if we language geeks are
>irresistably drawn to features that working practitioners (hardware
>designers etc.) don't particularly care about.  The whole quotation
>discussion could be an example of that.

Certainly, looking at the current CfV results, there seem to be a
bunch of people who have already used quotations, and a bunch of
people who say they will never use quotations.  I have worked around
their absence (by defining helper words) for decades, other people
have worked around their absence with return-address maniupulations,
so I don't think that practitioners don't care about them, unless you
define a practitioner to be someone who does not care about
quotations.

Looking at other languages, closures have been limited to functional
languages for a long time, but a few years ago, "lambdas" started
appearing in C#, then in Java and C++.  I guess there's a contingent
of programmers in these languages who don't need lambdas and won't use
it, but others use lambdas; it's probably too early to tell the
overall effect of lambda on these languages.

An earlier innovation was genericity; at the start this was probably
also something only for language geeks, but I think it's now
mainstream in Java, C++, and C#.  Just if anybody wonders if we need
this in Forth: Genericity is a solution for a problem that these
languages get from their static typechecking; Forth has no
typechecking, so it does not need to add genericity to the type
system.

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl  http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
comp.lang.forth FAQs: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/faq/toc.html
     New standard: http://www.forth200x.org/forth200x.html
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CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-10 16:52 +0000
  Re: CfV: Quotations Matthias Trute <matthias.trute@gmail.com> - 2016-08-10 11:19 -0700
  Re: CfV: Quotations Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-10 11:55 -0700
    Re: CfV: Quotations Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2016-08-14 20:52 +0000
      Re: CfV: Quotations hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-08-14 14:42 -0700
        Re: CfV: Quotations Julian Fondren <julian.fondren@gmail.com> - 2016-08-14 16:43 -0700
      Re: CfV: Quotations Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-15 22:16 -0700
        Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-16 07:13 +0000
          Re: CfV: Quotations Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-08-18 15:30 -0700
            Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-19 15:32 +0000
          Re: CfV: Quotations Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2016-08-20 20:46 +0000
            Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-21 09:32 +0000
              Re: CfV: Quotations hughaguilar96@gmail.com - 2016-08-21 11:06 -0700
                Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-24 17:02 +0000
              Re: CfV: Quotations Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2016-08-21 22:52 +0000
                Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-22 13:54 +0000
                Re: CfV: Quotations Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2016-08-22 23:19 +0000
                Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-24 15:54 +0000
                Re: CfV: Quotations Bernd Paysan <bernd@net2o.de> - 2016-08-28 00:43 +0000
                Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-28 09:53 +0000
                Re: CfV: Quotations Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2016-08-28 08:32 -0500
                Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-28 14:38 +0000
  Re: CfV: Quotations mhx@iae.nl - 2016-08-10 12:02 -0700
  Re: CfV: Quotations Gerry Jackson <gerry@jackson9000.fsnet.co.uk> - 2016-08-11 17:25 +0100
  Re: CfV: Quotations Julian Fondren <julian.fondren@gmail.com> - 2016-08-11 12:48 -0700
  Re: CfV: Quotations minforth@arcor.de - 2016-08-16 03:31 -0700
  Re: CfV: Quotations Gerry Jackson <gerry@jackson9000.fsnet.co.uk> - 2016-08-31 15:15 +0100
    Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-08-31 15:26 +0000
      Re: CfV: Quotations Gerry Jackson <gerry@jackson9000.fsnet.co.uk> - 2016-09-02 22:33 +0100
        Re: CfV: Quotations anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2016-09-03 06:47 +0000

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