Philosophical musings: interpreting models

[btanksley@hifn.com]

> From: Tom Novelli [mailto:tcn@clarityconnect.com]
> Subject: Re: Philosophical musings: interpreting models

> On 7 Sep 1999, Laurent Martelli wrote:

> > So I'd rather have one language (understand one semantic), and have
> > the opportunity to change the syntax to make it more 
> > user-friendly for
> > different domains. Take LISP. Most people think it has a very
> > inconvenient syntax because of all the parenthesis. However, it has
> > one of the cleanest semantic. What prevents us from wrting a special
> > editor that would allow us to write (2+5)*3 instead of (* 3 
> > (+ 2 5)) ? 

> Better yet, add an infix parser to a LISP or FORTH interpreter.  It's
> clean and simple.  For convenience I'd add a little special syntax:

There are complete reader macros for both Lisp and Scheme to do this.  Not
many people use them, though.  Infix is point-blank TERRIBLE for returning
results.  There's a nice little parser for Forth which converts some Fortran
into Forth.  Used like this:

VARIABLE x
1 x !
: some-word
   ." Hi, I'm calculating: "  i" 3*4+x" . CR ;

INTRAN is its name.

> Tom Novelli

-Billy