Terminology: Thunking vs Quoting - Cat Language

Message from discussion Terminology: Thunking vs Quoting

Christopher Diggins

More options Apr 4 2007, 6:42 pm

From: "Christopher Diggins" <cdigg...@gmail.com>

Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 15:42:02 -0700

Local: Wed, Apr 4 2007 6:42 pm

Subject: Re: Terminology: Thunking vs Quoting

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On 4/4/07, Scott Prouty <scott.pro...@solimarsystems.com> wrote:

> I kind of like "qv". When I encountered just "quote", it made me
> think of what "quote" meant in other langauges and I tried to reconcile its
> meaning

Out of curiosity, what are the different interpretations you can think
of for the following statements given your previous experience of
quote:

5 quote
[f] quote

To be honest I never learned a "quote" operator in any other language
prior to adding it to Cat and asking the question. I come from a
primarily imperative background. I like Manfred von Thun's (the Joy
language designer) nomenclarature of "quotations" to refer to
anonymous functions. Joy doesn't differentiate between lists and
functions, wheras Cat does, so I had to come up with a new operator.
This lead me to create "quote", which seemed apropos given the path I
followed.

> from other languages with how it is used in Cat. "qv" on the other
> hand
> seems to have no equivalent in other languages (at least the few I
> know of)
> and so no "baggage" gets attached.

I feel the same way.

> However, maybe "quote" in other function composition languages has the
> same meaning as the one in Cat, so using "quote" may be the best
> way to go.

I may make the "qv" the official term, and leave "quote" in the
library for posterity. Heck I will probably even add "constantly" to
the library just for the lispers. :-) Maybe programmers will come to
prefer one over another. The only concern I have with "qv" is how
cryptic it may seem (but I do like its brevity), however I am hoping
that it won't come up frequently. People would be more likely to use
"curry" than doing actual quoting, interestingly enough, given a curry
one can define "qv" as "[id] curry", but I do it the other way around
"curry = [qv] dip compose". Quoting just seems to me to be more
primitive than currying.

The hardest part of designing a language might simply be finding names
for things!

:-)

> Thanks
> Scott Prouty

Thank you very much for your feedback,
Christopher

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