Concatenative Programming

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This space is for sharing news, experiences, announcements, questions, showcases, etc. regarding concatenative programming concepts and tools.

We'll also take any programming described as:

pipelined
stack-oriented
tacit
postfix / reverse Polish notation (RPN)

From Wikipedia:

A concatenative programming language is a point-free computer programming language in which all expressions denote functions, and the juxtaposition of expressions denotes function composition. Concatenative programming replaces function application, which is common in other programming styles, with function composition as the default way to build subroutines.

For example, a sequence of operations in an applicative language like the following:

y = foo(x)
z = bar(y)
w = baz(z)

...is written in a concatenative language as a sequence of functions:

x foo bar baz

Active Languages

Let me know if I've got any of these misplaced!

Primarily Concatenative

Concatenative-ish, Chain-y, Pipe-y, Uniform Function Call Syntax, etc.

Cheat Sheets & Tutorials

Discord

IRC

#concatenative on irc.libera.chat

Wikis

concatenative wiki

Wikipedia Topics

Subreddits

GitHub Topics

Blogs

planet-factor

Practice

Codewars (Forth, Factor, Nim)
Advent of Code
Code Golf (Forth, Factor, Nim)
Project Euler
Exercism (Nim)
Perl Weekly Challenge

founded 1 year ago

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Talk: "Concatenative programming and stack-based languages" by Douglas Creager, at Strange Loop 2023 (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

At the end, uxn is demoed a bit. From the design document:

As it stands today, modern software is built with extreme short-sightedness, designed to be run on disposable electronics and near impossible to maintain. We decided to not participate. Our aim is to create a machine that focuses on answering the handful of little tasks we need, which is centered around building playful audio/visual experiences.

Uxn was created explicitly to host software on pre-existing platforms, the design was advised primarily by relative software complexity, not by how fast it could run on new hardware standards. Features were weighted against the relative difficulty they would add for programmers implementing their own emulators.

The rest of that page and the whole project is worth checking out.