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5th was a typed concatenative programing language in development by John Nowak.
For those interesting in the type system, it was basically just a mildly augmented Hindley-Milner. Functions were all unary from stacks to stacks. Stacks were represented as nested pairs with a kind restriction such that pairs were always left-nested and functions were always from stacks to stacks.
kind = * | stack * = integer -- types of values | boolean | [stack -> stack] -- quotations stack = 0 -- the empty stack | stack * -- juxtaposition denotes "cons"
Example types:
swap : forall (s : stack) (a b : *), s a b -> s b a apply : forall (s t : stack), s [s -> t] -> t apply1 : forall (s : stack) (a b : *), s a [0 a -> 0 b] -> s b map : forall (s : stack) (a b : *), s (list a) [0 a -> 0 b] -> s (list b) each : forall (s : stack) (a : *), s (list a) [s a -> s] -> s
For algebraic data types, I generated eliminators. For example, declaring the usual 'list' data type would get you the following constructors and eliminator:
null : forall (s : stack) (a : *), s -> s (list a) cons : forall (s : stack) (a : *), s a (list a) -> s (list a) unlist : forall (s t : stack) (a : *), s (list a) [s -> t] [s a (list a) -> t] -> t
You could use these to write familiar functions:
sum : forall (s : stack) (a : *), s (list a) -> s integer sum = [0] [nip sum 1 +] unlist
I should note that, because you're often recursing on a stack of a different size, you probably want to support polymorphic recursion. Without it, the type system will force you to stick to strictly iterative functions. A conservative rule would just be to require a type signature on all recursive functions (as inference for polymorphic recursion is an undecidable problem).
This revision created on Wed, 7 Dec 2011 05:12:59 by johnnowak