Re: Have we reached the asymptotic plateau of innovation in programming languages

On Jun 7, 1:21 pm, Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson
<joh...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeo...@verizon.invalid> writes:
[snip]


>
> <><><>
>
> Another point to make. Why do we assign from right to left? Is it in
> any way natural? What's wrong with
>
> a + b --> c "a plus b assigned to c"
>
> instead of
>
> c <-- a + b "c becomes a + b?"
>
> The more I think about it, I believe the former construct is a bit more
> natural since we read from left to right. However, I'd want to see or
> work on a non-trivial project in such a language to make up my mind.


But we already have languages that support


    a b + c ! ( stack based, for bang read store )


or


    ADD A TO B GIVING C.


I'll let you guess which languages support these constructs.


>
> For an Arabic programming language, all bets are off.


      ! c + b a


My first example reversed. The arity of the operators make it easy to
parse left to right too; "Store in c the sum of a and b". It would be
a trivial modification to a stack-based compiler to parse right to
left.

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