[MUD-Dev] Properties of computer languages

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 06:38 PM 6/17/99 +0200, I personally witnessed Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt
jumping up to say:
>
>To all the the answers taking a turn into the computability area of
>languages, .. c'mon guys :-) you know this is not what he's looking for!

To an extent, it is. However, what I'm really looking for is that one
specific list. :)

I'm doing something reasonably insane. (Shhh. Don't tell anyone.) The
language I am designing has several design criteria:

	It must be small.
	It must be crippled. 
	It must be impractical. 
	It must be inefficient.
	However, it must still work. 

You know... a military language. It gets the job done, but it's neither
pleasant nor efficient. Just effective.

Yeah, I know, don't design inefficiency in -- it will happen in the
implementation. But I'm talking about BIG inefficiency. To give you an
example, here's a small portion of what I'm improving on:

There are two user-definable variables. %1 or %8 will prompt you for a
value. These are the same variable, but there is a subtle difference
between them which makes no real sense and which I won't go into at this
time. %6 must be set programmatically using the code '%#value'. You will
not be prompted for a value. Likewise, %1/%8 cannot be set
programmatically. When you want to access the value in %6, you use %6. When
you want to access the value in %1/%8, you use %4. You can also use %5,
which will increment the value in %1/%8 and then proceed to return the
newly incremented value. Otherwise %5 is just like %4 or %6. When you want
to examine the value in %6 for comparison, you use '%#<value', '%#>value',
or '%#=value'. You can also use '%#+value' or '%#-value' to add to or
subtract from %6. You cannot subtract from or make comparisons to %1/%4/%8.
You can, however, add any arbitrary value to it by using %5 in a loop.
Unfortunately, in order to do so, you will need a loop counter, which
requires the use of %6, in which case you would obviously be better off
just using %6 to begin with -- which you would do with '%8;%#%4;%#+whatever'.

Well, the best I can say for this language is that given large enough
effort and small enough goals, it does the job. I'd like the goals to grow
a bit. It would be nice if the effort decreased a little, but it's not
really *necessary*. I *like* this skill to be a little difficult. ;)

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
| U L T I M A T E   U N I V E R S E   I S   N O T   D E A D 
| 774577496C6C6E457645727355626D4974H       -=CABAL::3146=- 


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