Intent

[iepos@tunes.org]

> What I 'know' is that other than Fare, I'm not picking up on any
> meaningful discussion of metadata going on in this list, which
> is the main reason I don't participate more in the discussions. 
> I can see plenty of evidence of incidental or inferential metadata,
> but I can get that out of any language, no matter how advanced, or
> how obtuse.  Talk of whiz-bang ways of implementing
> yet-another-language-with-some-induction-logic is, while interesting,
> old hat, and does nothing for readability before I've had my
> morning coffee, which is exactly when I'm going to botch the code.
> 
> No one talks of formalized metadata, which is what I am after, and what
> I thought/think Fare is after.  Why?

It is generally understood that my project, at least, is only
for a "TUNES--" ... Thus, I'm not now considering _all_ the
goals of TUNES. My main focus now has been to achieve efficient
storage management. 

But, you may say that reflection is quite an important feature, and
that it should not just be swept under the rug. The terminology
associated with reflection always seems to get very confusing,
but you might say that Joy _is_ reflective, in that programs
themselves can be pushed onto the stack and manipulated as
first-class citizens, and in fact this is quite a common
practice in Joy programs.

Anyhow, this is probably not the only kind of reflection you want...
However, I suspect that a Joy-like system would make a nice
base for a system that was reflective in other ways. One of the
author's goals was that Joy programs be easy to reason about by
other programs.

Joy is different from other systems in ways that may seem unnatural;
however, I suspect that if you looked seriously at it, you would find
its approach very useful.

 (The system and its documentation can be found at:
  http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/philosophy/phimvt/j00syn.html)

- "iepos" (Brent Kerby)