Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hpfcdc!marc
From: marc@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Marc `Bo Who?' Sabatella)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Re: Elegance (was Re: Language Tenets)
Message-ID: <5160020@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Date: 24 Jul 89 19:04:22 GMT
References: <165@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl>
Organization: HP Ft. Collins, Co.
Lines: 11

>In the POP-2 language and its derivatives, multi-result functions are handled
>in a very straight forward manner:
>...
>If you think of "f(x,y)" as "push x, push y, call f", and "-> x" as "pop x",
>then the underlying [stack] mechanism and its usages should be self evident.

It is even more straightforward in Forth, where values are pushed by simply
computing them, and implicitly popped by calling a word that requires
an argument.  Since parameters are not named, however, you get a lot of the
"dup swap drip drop" that contributes to Forth's being considered a Write Only
language.  It seems POP-2 may have found one way around this.