The Concatative Language XY | Hacker News Reader

The Concatative Language XY

nsl.com

49 pointsofalkaed18 comments

The code and details about various versions are available on the homepage which weirdly does not really explain the language.

http://www.nsl.com/k/xy/xy.htm

So this is the blog of Stevan Apter. As you might guess from having a 3 letter vanity domain, he and this website have been around a long long time. It's mostly code golf style stuff posted to the J Software and Concatenative Languages lists. So yeah it'll be terse and obscure outside that community.

The domain name stands for No Stinkin' Loops, a reference to how APL style languages lift iteration to combinator expressions.

I did not know any of that, did not even consider if it was a vanity domain but did briefly wonder if nsl was the domain for some small country. I think the homepage does a good job of covering everything we need to know and in someways does a better job, but this posting provides a better overview for a HN submission. I included the homepage since some would probably skim the post or only read as much as they need to get the idea and miss the note at the bottom, someone would have probably posted asking where the code was.

Thanks for the background info.

Yeah, I stumbled onto J et all after seeing an interesting entry into the ICFP programming contest. So I was on the concatenative languages email list for a bit and knew nsl.com from there.

I've always found this snippet interesting: https://nsl.com/papers/kisntlisp.htm

Comparing the lisp to the non linenoise k syntax you can see there really is something compelling to this sort of lifting of iterator at a time fiddling to a higher level of abstraction where you just think about the shape of what you want.

Including discussion of XY 2.0 and its flatness (all partitions of a sequence of program tokens are semantically equivalent).

I’m the Alex mentioned in the acknowledgments, feel free to ask your questions.

In what way did you carry the ideas forward? Did you create a language which builds on it or did you just help Stevan develop the ideas of XY? Curious in anything you can contribute.

(2004)[0] And yet you submitted it twice in 5 months? weirdly indeed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44880307

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9216548

It is the same topic but not the same submission, if topics can't be repeated HN will die in short order. Are you suggesting that I am trying to revive my 20 year dead language by posting it twice within 5 months? my posting history should prove that I am not capable of creating such a language.

Not criticizing you, you perform a great service to HN, I am just confused by your post and that might just be a failing of mine. Either way, thanks for all you do.

Submitted headline is missing an ’en’.

Something about that looked wrong but I just could not quite see it. To late to edit.

"The Concatenative Language XY" discussion (typo in title).

For search.

This helped me finally grok continuations!

interesting mix of k and joy. the queue manipulation primitives like -> and => have no equivalent in joy, lets you do things like call/cc in a few lines

Fwiw, bing/chat identifies the implementation K version as a K2, in a style which might be an easy port to K3.

I'm making a new language inspired in XY

So, basically a less-readable Forth?

Interesting. But looks like assembler and more complicated.

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