Concatenative Programming

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Hello!

This space is for sharing news, experiences, announcements, questions, showcases, etc. regarding concatenative programming concepts and tools.

We'll also take any programming described as:


From Wikipedia:

A concatenative programming language is a point-free computer programming language in which all expressions denote functions, and the juxtaposition of expressions denotes function composition. Concatenative programming replaces function application, which is common in other programming styles, with function composition as the default way to build subroutines.

For example, a sequence of operations in an applicative language like the following:

y = foo(x)
z = bar(y)
w = baz(z)

...is written in a concatenative language as a sequence of functions:

x foo bar baz


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Hey, it includes Factor!

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Animated preview

This is not my own project!

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Discussion on HackerNews

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Slint is a GUI toolkit, and is largely not relevant to concatenative programming. But the latest release adds a touch of postfix to the mix, which is nice to see.

From the blog post:

Math Gains Postfix Support

A subtle but profound change to the language. Traditional syntax:

Math.max(20, Math.abs(value.x))

New postfix syntax:

value.x.abs().max(20)

The new syntax improves readability by making the transformation steps more explicit. It works well for many operations but has limitations:

Effective for simple transformations (e.g., abs, max) Less intuitive for operations like clamp or atan2.

pos.y.atan2(pos.x) // Less clear than atan2(pos.y, pos.x)

So for now you cannot use postfix for all functions in the Math namespace. We may revisit these cases later, so give them a try and let us know your thoughts.

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I wanted to map over a nested array in factor so I created a helper function:

: nested-map ( a quote -- a' ) swap [ over map ] map nip ;

which i then called with

{ { 1 2 } { 3 4 } } [ 1 + ] nested-map

But when I call it I get the error from the title.

If I just paste the body of the function it works as intended:

{ { 1 2 } { 3 4 } } [ 1 + ] swap [ over map ] map nip

So I guess I have two questions: is there a better way to achieve the original goal, but also how am I supposed to create higher order functions without getting this error?

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