Crosscut

Okay, so we have an example of non-trivial data flow through multiple functions. And we want to handle that without assigning variables, because we need to somehow justify the existence of postfix syntax in our language. Maybe we could do it like this:

a
    { b } map_x
    c

Here we assume that, as in yesterday's example, a returns something that contains an x. We feed that to b, using some kind of combinator (map_x), and b converts it to something else. Then we feed everything into c.

And granted, this is more concise. But it's also less clear. And while maybe there's a better middle ground, this would be yet another thing I get to figure out, while I have bigger problems.

Traditionally, postfix syntax is coupled with a stack-based evaluation model. But Crosscut no longer uses that. And it seems that without stack-based evaluation, postfix syntax no longer provides much of an advantage.