Joy (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 10:39, 4 October 2007

Revision as of 17:41, 7 October 2007

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== Mathematical purity ==

One of the most appealing aspects of Joy is this: the [[meaning]] function is a [[homomorphism]] from the [[syntax|syntactic]] [[monoid]] onto the [[semantics|semantic]] [[monoid]]. That is, the syntactic relation of [[concatenation]] of [[symbol]]s maps directly onto the semantic relation of [[Function composition|composition]] of [[function (mathematics)|functions]]. It is a [[homomorphism]] instead of an [[isomorphism]] because it is [[onto]] but not [[one-to-one]], that is, some sequences of symbols have the same meaning (e.g. "dup +" and "2 *") but no symbol has more than one meaning.

Joy manages to be practical and potentially useful, unlike the otherwise similar [[Unlambda]]. Its library routines mirror those of ISO [[C (programming language)|C]], though the current implementation is not easily extensible with functions written in C.