4 ms·
Author here. Ask me anything :-)
by smaddox 5y ago
Author here. Ask me anything :-)
- bananabiscuit 5y agoWhat are the prerequisites for understanding this?
- smaddox 5y agoGood question! I've managed to pick it all up through various Wikipedia pages and journal articles on programming language theory and type theory. There's probably some good books and/or review articles that could take you through all of the foundations, but I don't know what they are. All you really need to understand, though, is the syntax for describing syntax, small step semantics, and big step semantics, and what those mean. If you go back to the previous post on the UCC, I try to explain each of those in the context of that calculus. If you have any specific questions about things you find confusing or opaque, I'd be happy to answer them. It might also help to read the source code for UCC and UMCC, if you're more familiar with code. But code tends to be much lower level, where it can be difficult to see the forest through the trees.
- freemint 5y agoCould you give a less then 10 sentence answer to "Why?" ?
- smaddox 5y agoI believe we're a long way from the global optimum programming language and associated tools. I've been brainstorming ideas for improving programming languages for years. Dawn is my attempt to distill all of that into a new language.
- freemint 5y agoAnd why multiple stacks?
- smaddox 5y agoI thought I addressed that quite clearly in the post, did I not? Multistacks relieve much of the pain of stack shuffling while retaining the benefits of concatenative notation, e.g. refactorability. There are also other emergent benefits such as global variables without the drawbacks.