# Typing a Functional Stack-Based Language

## Christopher Diggins — 2007-03-18 21:51:44

    I've rewritten the earlier Cat technical report and made it into a

    more general purpose article: Typing Functional Stack-Based Languages.

    It is available for download at http://www.cat-language.com/paper.html

    The abstract follows:

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    Typing Functional Stack-Based Languages

    Stack-based languages have been in continuous use for approximately

    four decades, and are still very popular today as intermediate

    languages. Many of the most well-known stack-based languages (e.g.

    Forth, Postscript, CIL, JVML) lack support for functional programming

    at the primitive instruction level. Some notable exceptions are the

    Joy programming language by Manfred von Thun and the Factor

    programming language by Slava Pestov. There has also been a recent

    proposal to add lambda expressions to Forth by Lynas and Stoddart.

    While functional stack-based languages are gaining popularity, none of

    these have a static type system. This paper addresses this gap by

    formally expressing the operational semantics and type system for Cat,

    a small functional stack-based language.

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    If you care to share any comments or suggestions it would be greatly

    appreciated!

    Christopher Diggins

    http://www.cdiggins.com