The Fundamental Concept of Programming language X

[Nick Rothwell]

In article <2886 at water.waterloo.edu>, ljdickey at water (L.J.Dickey) writes:
>Readers are encouraged to track the progress of SAX (Sharp APL for UNIX),
>which has introduced some new combinators.  Their vocabulary uses words
>like "noun", "verb", "adverb", and "conjunction".  An adverb corresponds
>to a mathematical operator because it acts on a function ("verb") and 
>returns a function as a result.

Why are "operators" different to functions?

What do you do about full higher-order facilities (e.g. higher-order
functions returning higher-order functions)? "adadadadadverbs"?

>    L. J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.

		Nick.
--
Nick Rothwell,	Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh.
		nick at lfcs.ed.ac.uk    <Atlantic Ocean>!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick
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