Re: On Stack-Based Languages (was Re: on Perl)

On 18/04/2024 09:55, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 08:05:23 -0700, John Ames wrote:
 

*Syntactically* it's very simple, but explicit stack-orientation with
reverse-Polish notation is a *very* different programming paradigm than
practically everything else out there ...

 The only really tricky part of stack-based programming is keeping track of
what’s on the stack.
 I did some messing about with a reboot of PostScript which tried to add
some niceties, like stack guards and lexical binding. Here’s an example of
the sort of thing I was able to get working (“ddef” and “dstore” define
and assign to dynamically-bound variables, while “ldef” and “lstore”
correspondingly work on lexically-bound ones):
 

I think I have only ever heard of one person who actually uses PostScript for programming by hand, rather than as a print output format.  That is Don Lancaster, an electronics engineer who is a big fan of "magic sines" (binary strings with low harmonics) and does all his coding in PostScript.  Anyone wanting to see a significant library of PostScript code might be interested.
<https://www.tinaja.com/magsn01.shtml>