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by etatoby 1248 days ago
I'm very puzzled by this language. Why put the verbs at the end of the sentence, for instance? Was this shell inspired by Japanese or German?
2 comments

Because that's the very definition of a concatenative language.
I don't think that there's anything inherent about concatenative languages that forces them to be postfix. The Wikipedia definition (not authoritative, surely, but one we can all access) is:

> A concatenative programming language is a point-free computer programming language in which all expressions denote functions, and the juxtaposition of expressions denotes function composition.

As long as all functions are fixed arity—admittedly a serious limitation—there doesn't seem obviously to be any reason you couldn't write the function first (though of course it's fair to ask why you would want to).

Om is a prefix concatenative language

https://www.om-language.org/index.html

I associate concatenative languages with stack languages, which means that the postfix syntax is obvious. But as the sibling comment mentioned, that doesn't necessarily need to be the case.
It makes for strict left-to-right evaluation/execution.