User talk:Snowyowl

Hey-o, A0A0!
Putting its susceptibility to that atrocious pun aside, I've taken an interesting in your language. So much so that I decided to write an interpreter for it. It follows your specification faithfully, I think, except that Ruby's negative indexing capabilities made it bothersome to implement the blank void above the program, so I didn't. : )

Unfortunately, despite my layman's grasp of the Y combinator, I've thus far been unable to get a loop going. I'm almost certain I'm simply missing something, but my intuition tells me that A0A0's semantics just don't make it possible. A line must be padded on both ends if it's to repeat itself, but then you lose the ability to modify its second-to-last argument to do something useful. What're your thoughts on having last-number modifications instead affect the last non-append instruction? Also, because it would almost certainly make looping much less tedious, how do you feel about having the line counter wrap in either direction? Andkerosine (talk) 01:54, 24 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi! Don't worry, I chose the name with that sort of pun in mind.
 * I think you're right, looping is almost impossible. I figured out how to make a simple while(1) {output("hello")}, and assumed that was enough when I wrote the page, but the "operation" instructions clearly don't work properly.
 * I haven't updated the spec yet because I'm only 99% sure that a construction like

A0 I0 A0 O0
 * with some instructions past the trailing A0, can't be made to work. (It duplicates the extra arguments every time it's run, so it probably won't be very helpful.)
 * Anyway, yes, I'm strongly considering a modification to the spec, and I already have the new semantics in mind (just haven't bothered to update the article). I really hate to break your implementation now that it's all written up though - it looks gorgeous. Snowyowl (talk) 11:23, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

The V operator does seem to have solved most of the issues. I've incorporated the new spec into my interpreter and confirmed that your cat works perfectly. Andkerosine (talk) 02:13, 25 January 2013 (UTC)