Documentation for Cognate words??

[dragoncoder047]

There isn't any documentation on each builtin word, and so for the ones that take and/or return blocks, the semantics are very confusing. Case in particular. What are the semantics of that, and everything else? Writing it as Forth stack-effect diagrams or just some example code would help.

[shreder95ua]

i can try to help with documentation, if only the admins will want to

[StavromulaBeta]

I'm currently at university so I'm a tad busy, but I'll be able to write some more documentation once the term finishes - as well as actually finish the compiler rewrite!

[StavromulaBeta]

Also, the behaviour of some combinators such as Case might change in future, as the current iteration is very difficult to optimise and can be a bit confusing.

[dragoncoder047]

I might use the "old" (i.e. current) behavior of Case in TEHSSL, because then you don't have to write ( ) around a function that is comprised entirely of a large Case switch.

[StavromulaBeta]

Well that part of the behavior I'm keeping. The bit I'm concerned about is the fact that you can do this, maxing blocks and value types.

Def F as
   Case 1 is 2
   Case (> 3) is (+ 1)
   Case -1 is (+ 3)
   otherwise 5;

The problem with this being that it has to do dynamic dispatch on the type passed to it, and it's very difficult to generate good code from this.

[StavromulaBeta]

Well that part of the behavior I'm keeping. The but I'm concerned about is the fact that you can do this, maxing blocks and value types.

Def F as
   Case 1 is 2
   Case (> 3) is (+ 1)
   Case -1 is (+ 3)
   otherwise 5;

The problem with this being that it has to do dynamic dispatch on the type passed to it, and it's very difficult to generate good code from this.

Perhaps a better solution would be to have variants of Case that take differing combinations of blocks and values.

[StavromulaBeta]

This is uglier but generates much better code, since types are more deterministic:

Def F as
   Case (== 2) then (3 Drop)
   Case (> 3) then (+ 1)
   Case (== -1) then (+ 3)
   otherwise (5 Drop);

[StavromulaBeta]

Unfortunately I can't find any other languages that implement anything like the Case combinator here (closest is probably Factor) so I haven't got much to work with.