S. Alexander Jacobson <alex@shop.com> writes

I just found out about a functional programming language called Joy (see http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html).

Joy differs from Haskell in that it has no variables. Instead, all functions are postfix, taking a stack as their argument and returning a stack as a result. [..] tree-rewriting rules go away), faster development, easier optimization (search and replace lists of functions) and even simple meta-programming. Here is a quick example program to give a flavor for how it works.

[1 2 3 4] [dup *] map == [1 2 3 4] [square] map

is the same as Haskell's

map (\x->x*x) [1,2,3,4] == map square [1,2,3,4] [..]

They say FP language and internal language of Miranda (S, K combinators) also avoid variables. What is the difference to Joy? I thought it may be a good strategy for a compiler to get free of variables, but it is hard for a programmer to write programs avoiding variables. Is Joy programming a joy? ----------------- Serge Mechveliani mechvel@botik.ru