Comment by t-3
1 year ago
That's the "Whitney style". See: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
It's writing C in array-language style rather than intentional obfuscation.
1 year ago
That's the "Whitney style". See: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Essays/Incunabulum
It's writing C in array-language style rather than intentional obfuscation.
Thanks. I'm now reading this where people are trying to explain what happened in the ref/ directory.
https://github.com/kparc/ksimple/blob/main/a.c
Thanks for that link. The comments there help a lot. If I understand them, this is a minimal implementation of K with a lot of limitations, such as:
"the only supported atom/vector type is 8bit integer, so beware of overflows"
Still, it's fascinating how an interpreter can be written with such a small amount of code.
An interpreter for BLC, including tokenizing, parsing, and evaluation, can be written in as few as 29 bytes of BLC (and 650 bytes of C).
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Personally I believe in a sort of "evolution" of software that operates independently of intentions of the programmers.
I can totally believe that he didn't intentionally obfuscate it, but its incomprehensibility made it harder for other people to make a knockoff and thats why it survived and became successful.