On Tue, 21 Jul 2009, Timothy McDowell wrote:
> Well, I don't intend to make it go to any sort of production level, any sort
> of release for general audience. It's more of a test, you know?
Fair enough. I think the use of pronouns ("it") is interesting.
> Also, we wanted to create something like Inform 7's language (which is
> quite brilliant, check it out sometime) but not just for creating
Yes, Inform7 is very admirable. I think the pronouns idea is
implemented in that, but even in in inform7 you have to name things
explicitly more often than one might like ( for every thing (called
the underhider) which underlies the hider:[...]) so I think this is
worth developing in itself. Though that "(called <something>)" is a
nice solution to the problem given the stylistics of the language.
http://inform7.com/
for those unfamiliar with inform7.
And search for inform7 poetry. :-)
> interactive fiction, which obviously makes it much harder. We're just a
> bunch of teens messing about tho, so don't expect much of anything ;)
An interesting angle of language design to consider is what aspects
are made really easy to write by the language. In Forth, for
example, pretty well all parameters get passed on a stack, so that
makes function calls simpler, and reverse polish notation simplifies
some things at the cost of having to keep the stack in one's head
when reading the code. The parser in Forth is interesting as well,
it is sometimes described as a language without a syntax as uo much
can be changed. Inform7 makes handling common objects easy, as well
as movement, and other game related matters. If it has a weakness
it may be that it is mostly (apart from tables) prose, and some things
like structures are more difficult to express clearly in prose than
something that looks more like code. Lisp makes everything,
including the program, into a list. That makes manipulating the code
with code easy. But it does mean that one has to have lots of
parentheses, an obstacle to the beginner, the experienced user
barely notices them. Having a clear model of what you want to do
with the language may be useful. Perl brought us a unification of
various tools we had separately in Unix (awk, sed, grep), and Perl4
was simpler in a number of respects than perl5. I never got to work
with perl{3 or less}. And Ruby was intended to be a better Perl, with
simpler syntax for handling objects.
So, keep at it, you might even have something worthy of academic
publication before too long (if that's of interest).
Hugh
>
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 6:45 AM, J David Eisenberg <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Timothy McDowell wrote:
> >
> > > I think potion is pretty cool. I'm currently working on a parser and
> > > compiler with a buddy for our own little language (haven't decided on a
> > > name...). Here is an example:
> > > create number x and set it to 3. # can also be
> > > create number x. set it to 3.
> >
> > Reminds me a bit of COBOL. Who is the intended audience for your language?
> >
> > >
> > > if x < 5 then
> > > print "Jumping jellyfish! 3 is less than 5!". # Can also be a one
> > liner.
> > > Periods end statements (sentences).
> > >
> > > create verb skipcount that takes a number. set skipcount to
> > > create number count and set it to 0.
> > > until count >= 50 print count.
> > >
> >
> > --
> > J. David Eisenberg http://catcode.com/
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> --Brains.
>
