Kids need an antidote to the brain damage that is standard mathematical notation. I prefer lisps variadic prefix notation, but if you're just doing fixed arity functions without higher order functions than prefix and post fix are as good as each other, and you don't have the dreaded sea of parenthesis.

▲ pitchlatte a day ago | parent [-]

what aspect of school level “mathematical notation” is so bad as to be brain damage inducing?

▲ cultofmetatron 19 hours ago | parent [-]

probably the arbitrariness of it. PEMDAS is more or less burned into my brain at this point but its basically the qwerty of notations.

▲ pitchlatte 19 hours ago | parent [-]

that’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.

▲ lioeters 19 hours ago | parent [-]

The need to remember operator precedence is a consequence of the infix notation syntax.

▲ antonvs 18 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s a tradeoff against lots of irritating silly parentheses.

▲ Someone 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Postfix doesn’t need parentheses.

Prefix technically doesn’t need, either, if you avoid functions taking variable number of arguments and have a grammar that can reliably detect function calls (could be hard if you’re allowing higher-order functions)

Even with functions taking a variable number of arguments, you could do it the C way and use the argc, argv trick, giving you

  * 2 + 3 5 6 7 3  ⇒  (* (+ 5 6 7) 3)  ⇒  54

I think you’d have to be a bit of a masochist to do that, though.

That also is why I think varargs functions tend to be rare in bare bones forths. You’d have to write

  5 6 7 3 + 3 2 *

Using custom names for the varargs functions would help for the 2-argument version.

▲ lioeters 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hence Forth.

	▲	WolfeReader 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
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