[Push] No Name type and Define instructions in psh?

[Lee Spector]

FWIW I've been slack in implementing names in my recent implementations (schush and clojush) in part because I've never found names to matter much in evolution. They're great for demonstrating the language and for writing code manually, but I've tried in vain to produce evolutionary conditions in which they help to solve a problem. I would love to see an example in which they help.

John might have neglected names in Psh 0.1 because I infected him with my name-related pessimism. I'm a name fan in principle, except that (A) I haven't seen their utility in (evolutionary) practice, and (B) there's still something not quite right, or at least inelegant, in the distinction between first and subsequent uses in the Push3 name spec. I plan to add them to clojush (the environment I'm personally working in most at the moment), although I haven't been jumping to do it.

On the other hand I've recently had conversations (I think with Bill Tozier?) in which the importance of Push names was being asserted with gusto. Now that I type this I realize that this may have been the context of one of his systems (Nudge?) in which everything is quoted, and I may be merging my Tozier conversation with a Keijzer conversation about a push successor he's working on...

 -Lee



On Jun 25, 2010, at 5:13 PM, PerPlex Ed wrote:

> Thanks, Thomas.
> I only had a quick look at the psh source code and didn't see the string stack implementation.
> 
> Thomas said:
> 
> > As far as I can tell, there is a name stack implemented, but no non-generic instructions defined for it. Generic instructions such as "push" and "dup" are defined. In addition, if a string is in a program and is not recognized as a Psh instruction, that string will be pushed onto the Name stack. But, no Define instructions are implemented at this time. I'm not sure if that was a design choice or just an omission that should be added. I'll look into it.
> 
> 
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--
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College
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lspector at hampshire.edu, http://hampshire.edu/lspector/
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