functional programming

[William Tanksley]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2000 03:08:26 -0500, Tim Peters wrote:
>[Neel Krishnaswami, writes some unusual stuff about the Joy language,
> then recants]

>> Augh! I just realized I screwed up the names. Joy, while an
>> excellent and cool language (it's a functional Forth, more
>> or less), is fully and totally 100% Turing-complete.

>Joy is both much more and much less <wink> than a functional Forth.  It's
>both lovely & strange;

Agreed.

>e.g., I'm not sure I've bumped into a language before
>where it's considered natural (as opposed to merely possible, and with great
>strain) to write an *anonymous* recursive function.

I think you've bumped into Forth before, which does allow that.  It looks
like this:

:noname  endcase IF do-endcase ELSE RECURSE THEN ;

:NONAME defines a nameless word.  I believe this was added in the ANSI
standard, though, so that may have been after your time.

But yes, Forthers don't traditionally peel off nameless recursions that
commonly, while Joy's style seems to encourage it.

>> The language that I was /actually/ talking about is Charity,
>> which is a categorical programming language invented at the
>> University of Calgary:

>> http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/projects/charity/home.html

>New one on me -- thanks!  I see it shares category theory's fondness for
>wholesale invention of impenetrable terminology too <wink>.  Alas, doesn't
>look like an active project anymore.

Excellent!  I'll certainly have to study it.

Hmm, Charity's death seems to contradict II Corinthians 13.  Maybe it's
not really dead.

>die-young-and-leave-a-good-looking-corpse-ly y'rs  - tim

if-I-have-not-charity-I-am-nothing-ly y'rs

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley, in hoc signo hack