Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks

Wrapping Up Factor

A concatenative language such as Factor may seem backward at first, but the left-to-right flow of actions reads in the same sequence as we read words on a page. When you edit a line of code with a series of functions and want to process the result with one more function call, you add the word at the end of the line instead of wrapping everything in parentheses and adding the function call at the beginning, as you would do in many other languages.

Strengths

Factor is beautifully devoid of extra syntax and punctuation. Function composition is natural. Instead of naming variables to pass from one function to the next, the stack is used implicitly. Defining a function that returns more than one result is possible—and we really ...