🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <KERS.91Jan22082850@cdollin.hpl.hp.com> kers@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Chris Dollin) writes:
>They [POP-11 closures] do induce a tendency to organise argument lists in a
>particular way - with the most "freezable" arguments at the right - which may
>or may not be a good thing.

Actually, I don't know that it is the closures doing this. FORTH has an "open
stack" as I understand you to use the term, and "more freezable" arguments
are also at the right. For example,
 x y !
(! is the assignment operator) will assign the value x to the variable y.
I.e., a:=5   -->     5 a !
Here, the "a" comes second because you more often know statically what
variable you want to store into than you know what value you want
stored. That is, you more often have a procedure called "store into a"
than you do one called "store a 5". Contrast this with PostScript 
code, where the storage operator (def) is often preceded by an
exch (exchange) because the name of the value to be stored is coded
into the procedure but the value is passed in. (I think this was done
in order that procedure definitions had the name preceding the
block of code.)  Anyway, I think it is more the LIFO nature of
the stack than the closure mechanism that makes "freezable" arguments
on the right, unless you are implying that 
    : storexyz xyz ! ;
is a partial application of the ! function.  -- Darren
-- 
--- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware ---
----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, 
      Formal Description Techniques (esp. Estelle), Coffee, Amigas -----
              =+=+=+ Let GROPE be an N-tuple where ... +=+=+=