Nekochan Net

You are right. And therefore I can hack away on so-called real world languges at my own whimsy without facing the danger of getting flamed. Still, esoteric stuff is fascinating. E.g., how would you interpret the string 11000101?

Sounds like you might have an interest in C++ then?

You might find this interesting:

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/C++0x% ... rview.html



Dunno; any more hints?

No more hints. BUT - since you were the *only* one who showed any interest regarding this thread, here is the solution. I'd mentioned before Unlambda, based on the S, K and I combinators of combinatory logic augemented with application. These combinators have binary encodings - e.g., S <--> 00 and K <--> 01 - and application as "1". Since I <==> SKK, the above string is simply an encoding of (SK)K...Of course, instead of 0 and 1, I could have used [ and ], or : and ; or < and > or what have you...Try Unlambda, you will like it. Implement Church's bracket abstraction and one of the one-combinator bases on top of it - and you will have fun, believe me...

*EDIT*

Sorry, was bit absent-minded. "Church" should read "Curry"

You just brought all the lambda calculus pain that took so many years of therapy to forget.

I won't be able to sleep tonight now that he pain is coming back... It never ceases to amaze me the masochism of formal CS types

Hmm, it will take awhile for that to sink in; it's pretty alien from the code I'm used to looking at...



Actually when I first saw the thread I was thinking of "esoteric" as out-of-the-mainstream (ie. not C/C++), not the sort of tongue-in-cheek manner from the wikipedia article. I was hoping more people would post code samples because I was curious how C/C++ compared to other languages.

Out of curiosity, did you study CS at school?

Well, lambda calculus [and combinatory logic] play indeed an important role in logic itself [no CS here yet]. But, of course, in CS, they are at the heart of functional languages [and here I mean not only "esoteric" ones, but rather practical beasts like Haskell, ML, Miranda, etc.] - just think of LAMBDA in, e.g., Lisp...

If you accept "university" as "school" - yes.

I had a professor that made us prove correctness of code in several languages using lambda calculus. It was to say the least a painful experience. Made me realize that theoretical CS was not my thing. The professor was a fun guy, but was completely and utterly insane... a sort of a genious who was a prototype for something the world was not ready for.

We had a chap who's thing was "Weakest Precondition", I could see that people who followed his approach would never actually ship anything, they would still be trying to prove what they wrote worked rather than testing it.

The CS course started with the comment "there is no silver bullet", then had a number of lecturers try to convince everyone that their approach was the silver bullet.

Esoteric?

If you mean non-mainstream languages, I've used a few, but they aren't too far off the beaten path.

Some I have used:

IFTRAN, a preprocessor that adds structured programming concepts to Fortran. I used it back during the 1970's on a CDC 6600 mainframe. Same concept as RATFOR, I presume.

FORMAC, for FORmula MAnipulation Compiler, is an extension of FORTRAN. It was developed by Jean E. Sammet. (There's also a PL/I version for the IBM mainframes)

The additional capabilities of FORMAC permit direct computation, manipulation, and use of functions of advanced mathematics which can only be done indirectly and approximately in FORTRAN.


Macsyma -- I remember using it at NASA back in about 1975, over a teletype link to MIT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macsyma

GOAL - Ground Oriented Aerospace Language (used on Spacelab and other NASA/ESA projects)

GOAL, a standard language for test and ground aerospace operations specified by a team of Kennedy Space Center Civil Service software engineers defined in March, 1973.

HAL/S - Higher-Order Algorithmic Language/Shuttle.

Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience – By George Tomayko (Appendix II: "HAL/S, A Real-Time Language for Spaceflight")

HAL/S Documents, including the language specification, programmer's guide, and compiler manuals


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL/S

HAL/S is a real-time aerospace programming language, best known for its use in the Space Shuttle program. It was designed by Intermetrics in the 1970s for NASA. HAL/S is written in XPL, a dialect of PL/I.

The three key factors in writing the language were reliability, efficiency, and machine-independence. The language is designed to allow aerospace-related tasks (such as vector/matrix arithmetic) to be accomplished in a way that is easily understandable to people with spaceflight knowledge (and not necessarily with computer programming proficiency.)

HAL/S is designed without certain functions (such as "GOTO" in BASIC) that are known to be the cause of many errors. There are no abbreviations for keywords, and keywords are all reserved so that they cannot also be used as variables. Considerations such as this are designed to reduce the chances of errors occurring, and also make it easy for others to read and understand the programs produced (self-documenting code).

HAL is not an acronym. On the Preface page of the HAL/S Specification[1], it says,

"....Intermetrics wishes to acknowledge the fundamental contribution to the concept .....made by Dr. J. Halcombe Laning of the MIT's Draper Laboratory."

"HAL" was suggested as the name of the new language by Ed Copps, a founding director of Intermetrics, to honor Hal Laning, a colleague at MIT.

One particularly interesting feature of HAL is that it supports a three-line input format in which three source code lines are used for each statement, with the first and third lines usable for superscripts (exponents) and subscripts (indices). This was designed to be similar to mathematical notation.

The very last thing the lecturer said in the module I endured in the above (along with lots of other formal maths/logic stuff... someone worked out that we had exhausted the entire greek alphabet by the end of it) was the sentence:
"Of course you're unlikely to ever actually use any of this. But it was fun to learn, wasn't it"

He was right about the former, but wrong about the latter.

@R-ten-K
Yes, my lecturer for this stuff was exactly as you describe as well. A little off the wall in his line of work, but probably great fun when he goes to the pub afterwards.

@porter
Ah yes, cutpoints, preconditions, postconditions. An entire class to prove the correctness of a twenty line piece of code. I pity any poor guy who actually has to use it on something real.


Also, the most unusual/non-mainstream language I used was ZPL (Zebra Programming Lanuage) - for describing how to print labels and barcodes on industrial printers. Not the kind of language that will ever be on a computer science curriculum.

Yes I do like C++ and I had seen that presentation before, but totally forgot about it - now I have it bookmarked under google for future reference! woot!

Well, true - but that's certainly not specific to CS. We all have learned things in school we never used afterwards. E.g., over here I learned Latin. I never *used* it at all. But reading Asterix & Obelix in Latin is fun nevertheless still today [don't know whether these guys are known in the States at all].

The US has a different scale when using the term 'old'.

Tintin, Asterix and all the cool comics from Europe of yore are virtually unknown over here (the States).

In my high school we had to learn Latin and classic Greek. I always thought it was a waste of time, until I took the American SATs and it turned out all the obscure words they were using in the verbal part of it were Latin/Greek rooted. So I ended up with a fairly high verbal score, even though my English sucked I had a good backing for my guesses... So you never know when silly subjects may come in useful. I sent a bouquet of roses to my old latin teacher when I got a scholarship for a US college, I was such a pain in the ass as a student since I could not understand why on earth I had to read about Julius Caesar conquering the Galias and crossing that god damned river . I think I wrote "Mea culpa, me paenitet. Discipleo, mentore" or something like that in the card included with the roses... I forgot most of my latin by now...