4 ms·

This does look quite nice. I always felt that the operator precedence / association rules in other stack languages were by far the most difficult thing to get u

This does look quite nice. I always felt that the operator precedence / association rules in other stack languages were by far the most difficult thing to get used to, not the nonstandard symbols. This appears more inviting in that regard. I do have to question the choice of right-to-left (array language) evaluation order. I've personally always preferred left-to-right (stack language) evaluation. I feel like right-to-left requires you to think to the end of a line before you start typing anything at all, as the first thing you type is the last thing that's evaluated. Left-to-right would also allow re-evaluating and visualizing the stack as you write each operator.

alexisread 3y ago
...Swap your language prefs to say, arabic? ;) More seriously though, I think it depends what your background is. Maths works in prefix notation eg. f(g(x)) but I appreciate that you can hold the stack in your head easier with postfixLR. Many people who are used to lisp would probably prefer prefix notation. non-stack or array langs have a nice tradeoff that you can look at the code without having to keep a model in your head, notably many forth users annotate their code with stack diagrams to help. Personally I'm quite taken with rebol syntax, passing a stack/array as the rightmost operand. http://blog.hostilefork.com/rebol-vs-lisp-macros/ http://blog.hostilefork.com/rebol-vs-lisp-macros/
aebtebeten 3y ago
See https://lobste.rs/s/qygnov/uiua_concatenative_array_programming#c_xzzx7g https://lobste.rs/s/qygnov/uiua_concatenative_array_programm...
sullyj3 3y ago
> I feel like right-to-left requires you to think to the end of a line before you start typing anything at all Maybe this will make people tend to shorter lines, counterbalancing the natural tendency towards incomprehensibility of array and stack languages

alexisread 3y ago

...Swap your language prefs to say, arabic? ;) More seriously though, I think it depends what your background is. Maths works in prefix notation eg. f(g(x)) but I appreciate that you can hold the stack in your head easier with postfixLR. Many people who are used to lisp would probably prefer prefix notation. non-stack or array langs have a nice tradeoff that you can look at the code without having to keep a model in your head, notably many forth users annotate their code with stack diagrams to help. Personally I'm quite taken with rebol syntax, passing a stack/array as the rightmost operand. http://blog.hostilefork.com/rebol-vs-lisp-macros/ http://blog.hostilefork.com/rebol-vs-lisp-macros/

aebtebeten 3y ago

See https://lobste.rs/s/qygnov/uiua_concatenative_array_programming#c_xzzx7g https://lobste.rs/s/qygnov/uiua_concatenative_array_programm...

sullyj3 3y ago

> I feel like right-to-left requires you to think to the end of a line before you start typing anything at all Maybe this will make people tend to shorter lines, counterbalancing the natural tendency towards incomprehensibility of array and stack languages