Crosscut

Let's move on in my list of reasons for switching to prefix syntax and talk about combinators.

The big draw of postfix syntax is that you naturally write code in the order that it's evaluated in. So a b c instead of c(b(a())). But this simple example only works, if the outputs and inputs of those functions match exactly. a must produce what b consumes, which must produce what c consumes.

And most of the time, it won't be that simple. Maybe a returns a record with two fields, one of which is required as b's argument, the other is consumed by c, together with whatever b returns. Or something along those lines. Tomorrow, let's look into ways to handle a more complex case like this.