tomhrr

> Anyway, given from the examples for me this reads as a language to write hacky onliners of code which are probably easy to write once but hard to read anytime after.

There is definitely a 'write-only' angle to concatenative (postfix) languages that rely on a stack. I think this type of language/approach is uniquely well-suited to this use case, though, where the focus is interactive use, plus short programs that are not generally intended for distribution, since you get the most out of the advantages around conciseness, without incurring the costs that come with larger programs.

Thanks, and yep, the postfix notation allows for chaining commands together without parentheses. For example:

  1 2 +; 3 *

(The semicolon is used to indicate that the previous string (token) is a function and should be executed. In some instances this is implicit, like when the last string (token) in a larger command (like the one above) maps to a function name, in which case it will be treated as a function call even when no semicolon appears after it.)

> but the examples are too hard for me: both sh & cosh

Thanks, I'll look at adding some simpler examples.

> I would have to look up `-0`

The thing about '-0' is that it's not required in cosh, because you're dealing with proper values instead of text streams. The problem that '-0' (and '-print0') is addressing doesn't arise.

> Why does cosh use ; the syntax kinda looks like they're not needed?

';' needs to be used to denote the previous string (token) as a function where that can't be determined from context. For example, if you type '1 2 +' and press enter, the shell will assume that because there's a function called '+', the intention is to run that function, but you could also enter '1 2 +;' (or '1 2 + ;') to get the same result. Whereas '1 2 + 1 2 + +' doesn't work, because the shell doesn't know if the first two '+' symbols are meant to be interpreted as function calls or just plain strings. The other place where it assumes that a function call is intended is at the end of an anonymous function, so `[1 2 +]` and [1 2 +;]` have the same effect.

Yep, at least as far as working with structured data rather than streams of text is concerned. Apart from the syntax differences, this is generally much lighter weight, though, in that it doesn't have classes, in-depth system integration, or similar (not that those features are bad in Powershell).

The 'sh' command that it corresponds to is above it:

  find . -iname '*test*' -print0 | xargs -0 grep data

but possibly a bad assumption on my part that the mapping was clear. In any event, 'm' is for regex string matching, and 'f<' is for reading a file into a generator (basically an iterator over the lines in the file). It's a good point that more, simpler examples would help.