reading programs (part 3)
in the third part of my small series about programs that can be read i’d like to introduce two languages out of the mass of esoteric programming languages that focus on using commands that consist of single characters or ASCII-codes. this property is crucial for my own attempt in creating an esoteric programming language which i will sketch in the last instalment.
the first of the two languages is called
AlphaBeta
It uses the letters of the alphabet as commands. Upper- and lowercase letters are different commands.
A quote from the description page: AlphaBeta uses 5 registers as a way to store memory, 2 are changeable and hold an integer, 1 is a result register and cannot be changed, 1 is used for looping and the other is used for memory ( like brainfuck‘s > and < ). There is no way of comments. Also, AlphaBeta has 1 kb of ram.
a hello world programm in AlphaBeta:
cccCISccccCIScccCIYx SGSHaaCLgDLihhhDLDLgggDL TTGaaCL SGccbbbCLDLgggDLjggggDLSHDL TTGaaaCL
a program that copies its input to its output:
JCLigggO
more info:
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/AlphaBeta
the second language is
Capuirequiem
Capuirequiem uses the ASCII characters with the number codes 33 to 126 as commands or literals of the language.
a hello world program:
[Hello World!]O
a program that prints out the fibonacci sequence:
[This function output a number in decimal format]Z
[
[]D/V
D /01!\$ 48,_KW\C/
!SB DL Z\O
]"n{
[Print out the fibonacci sequence]Z
[1.]O 0"a{1"b{ [
"a}"b}D"a{_KD"b{
"n}X [.]O
1L
]X
The language is known to be Turing complete.
more info:
http://esoteric.voxelperfect.net/wiki/Capuirequiem
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7 Responses to “reading programs (part 3)”.
This is really interesting stuff, looking forward to seeing what your contribution to this strange genre is.
The idea of creating your very own programming language is inspiring. I’m really enjoying your short series Joerg. Thanks also for those contributions from Jim, Millie, Nick, Carol and Brian.
Code while indeed deep, IMHO for today’s digital writers/poets can also be beautifully ‘bendy’ beyond just initial satirical initiations/ instantiations or general generative promise – potential for outmaneuvering oulipian considerations –unseen strings swapping, comments cooking, it invokes something bordering on the ‘computationally genetic.’ also perhaps inferring almost clinical ideas–colder sharper models of literary aesthetic possibly – which require additional branches like LOLCODE to root or ground them in nature, preserve some humanity in their exposed processes –kidder’s soul of the machine perhaps.
For me the attraction of developing such codes is something subversive – famously the MS guys who developed DirectX did so without any official sanction or approval – force feeding the technical cycles of S/W & H/W that moved PC game dev along its evolutionary trajectory. Ethical Hacking has become all the rage lately. I laugh when I hear engineering managers, PMs or lecturers instruct early stage programmers to ‘think outside the box’ – when it is apparent that they themselves have no idea how big the box actually is. “Try to think within several small boxes” might be better advice. Particularly in relation to stack pointers, registers etc..
Some recent fun stuff programmers themselves got up to: Songsincode see: http://www.wait-till-i.com/2009/08/21/wow-so-that-is-how-memes-happen-songsincode/
I still occasionally threaten to finish reading – an eternal Golden Braid – so I’m looking forward to your Gödel influenced last installment Joerg
Yes, I too am looking forward to your Godel yodel, Joerg.
A book I’d recommend strongly to you and any other poet-programmer is Martin Davis’s Engines of Logic. This looks at the life and work of Leibniz, Boole, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert, Godel, and Turing in how it developed computers. The biographical sketches are fascinating and it also is excellent in the ‘history of ideas’ mode. Davis is a renowned logician himself. And the emphasis is on the development of the language of symbolic logic as the crucial thing in computing.
thanks for the nice comments & thanks, Jim, for the book tip. looks really interesting. we had a lot of Gödel, Turing etc. at university but almost nothing about the philosophical implications of their ideas. that’s what i am after these days. how can computer programs write themselves? how can a text create itself? how can a text reason about itself? modify itself? rereading Wittgenstein i enjoy exploring the boundaries between the exactness of mathematics and the blurriness of human language.
Wittgenstein, oddly, did not understand Godel’s work. He thought it was of the same order as the problematical, even erroneous attempts at logicization of the self-referential paradoxes. But actually there is nothing paradoxical about Godel’s work; it is a brilliantly successful logicization involving the self-referential. Which is to say that Wittgenstein was simply clueless about Godel’s work. Wittgenstein’s work is valued by artists, I feel, because Wittgenstein was a poetic stylist in his writing. But in mathematical logic, he’s just not in the same league as Godel and Turing or even Chomsky.
There are philosophical implications to Godel’s work because some of his results hold for all systems as powerful (or more powerful) than that of Principia Mathematica by Russell and Whitehead, for instance.
But it’s also important to note that, historically, even when the cutting edge mathematics of the day did not directly have philosophical implications, such as Newton’s system, it nonetheless was very influential in shaping the world views of the day.
it’s not only Wittgenstein’s style that’s interesting for me but also his treatment of language as a material or an object to reason about.
Interesting. That is what Godel does so successfully, isn’t it; his ‘incompleteness theorems’ are propositions concerning properties of sufficiently powerful formal systems.
What sorts of things does Wittgenstein say about language as a material or an object to reason about? Apart from “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”
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