Lambda the Ultimate

I have been working on a series of tutorial articles for my language, Popr.

For the first article, I designed a notation to present the semantics of the language in a way that I hope is easy to understand, and yet similar to how it is implemented in the compiler.

Concatenative languages, such as Popr, can be very terse. While this conciseness can make code both easier to read and to write, it can also make the same tasks difficult for those without a good understanding of the language. Furthermore, without the right semantic model, it is possible to develop a false understanding of the language that works for simple programs while leaving other programs as a mystery.

For this reason, I have developed a graphical notation for Popr that, while impractical for larger programs, can help develop an intuition for how the language works. In this notation, we will build machines that consume and produce dots.