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I've always found postfix languages like Factor to be far more readable than prefix (Lispy languages) and infix/postfix languages (all C-style languages, if we include both operators and functions).

Unlike prefix languages, you don't need for delimiters everywhere. Unlike infix notation, there's no complex precedence order to remember. What isn't there to like?

These languages all seem to be concatanative, and thus nearly always stack-based.

Could a modern language be implemented that was applicative over concatanative, and was still postfix-based?

Manishearth
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Louis
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  • Why not? The internal "parse tree" representation for all three is the same... If you are serious about trying this, I would suggest taking an existing language, giving it a "Postfix syntax" front end, and seeing how the community reacts. Good luck :-). – Nemo Jul 18 '11 at 01:29
  • I might try that :) The problem is that if I grab, let's say, some basic Haskell code, and then change it to RPN, the currying syntax then looks _very_ much stack-based. I'm being thrown off by syntactical similarities to other languages, perhaps. Even so, a tiny and embeddable postfix/functional language does sound like something I might want to try implementing :) – Louis Jul 18 '11 at 01:35

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