Joy, Lambdas, Combinators, Procedures

[iepos@tunes.org]

> > Well.. The meaning Joy associates with "3" is slightly different
> > from the ordinary English meaning of "three".
> > That the meaning differs may make it a 
> > little harder to read and write programs, but this is probably a matter of
> > taste.
> 
> Good grief, no!  Didn't you read the manuals?  Joy has problems, but it's
> _certainly_ not this one!  Programs in Joy are generally *dramatically*
> easier to understand (that is, realize what proofs are implied) and even to
> prove things about.

Well, I suppose Joy programs, once you get used to them, are easier
to understand than similar programs written in C, for example.
What I meant was that I'm not convinced that Joy programs are
easier to understand than similar programs written in a
purely functional language. But again, how "easy" a program is to understand 
varies from person to person. We could talk about program size;
I suspect that most programs written in Joy could be written in
as a functional program of similar size, but I can't really
support this, because I don't know of any functional language
that is as good as Joy (there may well be one somewhere, and I believe
one could be constructed).

> > Anyway, I find Joy to be quite an interesting system. But,
> > I don't know that its approach of using composition and quotation
> > is fundamentally superior to a purely applicative approach.
> 
> Read the manuals -- it's so clearly superior it's not even funny.

I've read most of the synopsis pages, but I'm not convinced.
(i've tried to get the interpreter working, but it won't compile
correctly on my machine). Anyway, I'm not going to seriously
claim that a purely applicative approach is better than (or even as
good as) the Joy (stack) approach either until I find or make a good 
functional system. 

Remember that by "a good functional system" I do not mean one that
requires (or even allows) the use of variables in forming functions;
the kind of system I'm thinking of would use combinators,
similar to "dup", "swap", and "pop", to form them.

> I do hope you'll take the time to read the docs for Joy; they're amazingly
> clear and fun to read.

Yes, I'll probably finish reading the rest of them sometime...

> > - "iepos" (Brent Kerby)
> -Billy

- "iepos" (Brent Kerby)