Concatenative topics
Concatenative meta
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Concatenative languages are very concise, because the "glue" between words (functions) is minimal; in effect, just whitespace. One line of concatenative code might call 6 words, and be equivalent to 6 lines of another language, because parameter names and variable bindings are omitted.
Concatenative languages encourage short definitions because there is very little syntactic overhead associated with creating a new word; any sequence of words can be "factored out" into a new definition. A common misconception is that they force you to write short definitions; this is not really true. Rather, they encourage you to write short definitions and re-use more code by not penalizing you if you choose to do so, and in practice most programmers choose to write short definitions and reap all the benefits this entails: code reuse, more opportunity to name and document, more exhaustive unit testing.
This revision created on Sat, 3 Jan 2009 01:32:30 by slava