RE: [colorforth] Re-connecting

[Frédéric DUBOIS<frederic.dubois@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, Mark. Thanks to your explainations I think I see your idea better.

> > Could you please give me an example of such functionnal language so I
can
> > take a closer look at the concept?
> 
> OCaml is one I am familer with, and I only give it as an example, not 
> something to emulate exactly. I think functional language of this type are

> an interesting study in language design. They start with a very simple 
> model of computation, the lambda calculus, which can represent any 
> computation. The lambda calulus has no concept of integers, lists, 
> addition, subtraction, however all of these can be encoded as 
> terms in the 
> language. The encoding of integers as church numerals would be very 
> inefficient in practice. The type systems of functional 
> languages express 
> the kinds of data, and the kinds of programs, the designers think are 
> useful. And typed data can have an efficient representation, for 
> example integer can be directly represented as a binary word. 
> Another view 
> of a type, is as description of the data, that is why I bring up this 
> example in particular. Although it does not exactly correspond to the 
> notion of a database I had in mind.
> 

Maybe another model are those OO-languages that let you adding properties to
objects at anytime like Io ( prototype-based OO language ) or "Kevo" which
seems to have Forth genes, although I only saw summaries about it. Of course
most of them rely on late binding. Quoting the overview of oCaml about its
type system " For instance, the sorting procedure for arrays is definied for
any array, regardless of the type of its elements", Io can do the same but
is type-less. I guess that strong-typing allows oCaml not to use
late-binding.
A more-or-less related idea I've experimented a bit with, is to enable each
word to have it's own compile-time behavior. Among other things, it allows
words to modify the context of the interpreter on the fly; Combined with
vocabularies, it enables some OO-like features.

 Amicalement,
  Frédéric

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