Meeting: Factor: a non-trivial stack language

Date: November 22, 2006
Speaker: Slava Pestov

I will start with a quick overview of key language features found in Factor (higher-order functions, generic functions, continuations, code-as-data...), and how they relate to abstractions you know and love from Common Lisp and Scheme. I will attempt to explain the philosophy of programming with a stack. I will then talk about the architecture of the Factor compiler, which implements some interesting optimizations I developed which are specific to stack-based languages. Finally I will give an overview of the Factor user interface framework. The presentation slides will actually be displayed by a Factor program running on my laptop (with PDF dumps as backup), and I will be able to do a little bit of live coding (assuming my software doesn't fail horribly).