B i n a r y
- Not to be confused with Binary.
NOTE: I AM STILL WORKING ON THIS ARTICLE. PLEASE DO NOT EDIT IT UNLESS YOU FIND A MISTAKE LIKE SAYING "Esotreic".
B i n a r y is an Esoteric programming language by 5anz. That's me, so I'm going to stop speaking in the third person. It's my first Esolang, but more importantly, it's inspired by Whitespace, but because it only has 3 symbols, and not because you can't see your program! The idea is to lower the number of valid symbols from 3 to 2, that's why I named it B i n a r y , It's Binary, but also, in a way, Whitespace! Lastly, B i n a r y is Stack based, though also has 256 cells.
Commands
IMP
Like in Whitespace, there are different kinds of commands in B i n a r y, you need to type the Instruction Modification Parameters (IMP), Actually, Just check the Whitespace article, the rest of this one will assume you understand Whitespace.
| IMP | Command |
|---|---|
| 000 | I/O |
| 001 | Stack Manipulation |
| 01 | Arithmetic |
| 10 | Flow Control |
| 11 | Grid Access |
Also, every B i n a r y program begins at the first 1, everything before it (and that same 1) are ignored by the program, so 10010... and 010010... mean the exact same thing.
Numbers
Numbers can't just be in binary, while you could write "1100" in the real world and people understand what you mean (given context), that wouldn't work in B i n a r y, there's no way to stop writing! So B i n a r y uses a Balanced Ternary system, the way I did this was by combining 2 bits, and then using the following table to determine what they mean.
| B i n a r y | Balanced Ternary |
|---|---|
| 00 | 0 |
| 01 | 1 |
| 10 | Stop Number |
| 11 | -1 |
Also, numbers are limited to 16 bits, meaning 01010010 and 010001000000110111000110 both just mean 12 (I made this decision after the idea of balanced ternary and never bothered to change it).
I/O
| Commands | Parameters | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | - | Take input as a number and push it onto the stack |
| 01 | - | Take input as an ASCII character and push it onto the stack |
| 10 | - | Pop a value off the stack and output it as a number |
| 11 | - | Pop a value off the stack and output it as an ASCII character |
So yeah, generally, the first bit represent input/output, the second bit is number/character. also, outputting 0 as an ASCII character ends the program, as well as outputting what I call "fake 0" in anyway, but I'll get to that later.
Stack Manipulation
| Commands | Parameters | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 000 | Number | Push a number onto the stack |
| 001 | - | Pushes either a 1 or a 0 onto the stack randomly |
| 01 | - | Duplicate the top item on the stack |
| 10 | - | Swap the top 2 items on the stack |
| 11 | - | Pop the top item on the stack and do nothing with it |
Arithmetic
The order in which you do subtraction division and modulo depends on what's larger, so whether you pop 5 or 12 first, your doing 12-5 either way (or 12/5 or 12%5 depending on the command)
| Commands | Parameters | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 000 | - | Pops the top 2 values and adds them together |
| 001 | - | Pops the top 2 values and subtracts them |
| 010 | - | Takes the additive inverse of the top item |
| 011 | - | Pops the top 2 values and multiplies them together |
| 100 | - | Pops the top 2 values and divides |
| 101 | - | Takes the multiplicative inverse of the top item and multiplies it by 65,536 (2^16) |
| 11 | - | Pops the top 2 values and Does the modulo operation |
Also, division rounds down automatically, decimal numbers don't exist.
Control flow
Labels are typed like normal binary numbers, as there are only 256, so 12 is 00001100 instead of 01010010, that would be 82, which isn't written 0100000110 unlike how it normally is.
| Commands | Parameters | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | Label | Mark a location |
| 01 | Label | Go to a label |
| 10 | Label | Pop a value off of the stack, if it's 0, go to a label |
| 11 | Label | Pop a value off of the stack, if it's not 0, go to a label |
Grid access
The grid contains 256 cells, typed the same as a label. you can think of it like a storage system, kind off? The table should clear things up.
| Commands | Parameters | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Cell | Pop a value off the stack and replace a cell with that value |
| 1 | Cell | Push the value of a cell to the stack |
Ending a program
You don't actually NEED to end your program with 0, I figured since you can type ANY sequence of 1s and 0s and it will be a list of commands, I figured I'd keep that property by doing this, so ...00010 is the same as ...0001, similar to how 010010... is the same as 10010....
Fake 0
If you try to access an empty stack, you'll end up with fake 0, a weird number that interacts with commands... differently... A table is the only way I can explain this...
| "Full" Command | Parameters | Fake 0 Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 0001... | Both - | End the program |
| 00101 | - | Does nothing |
| 00110 | - | Does nothing, whether there's 1 item or not |
| 00111 | - | Does nothing |
| 01... | All - | Does nothing, yes, all of them |
| 101... | Both label | Acts as if it popped a 0 |
| 110 | Cell | Replace the cell with 0 |
Example Programs
As no interpreters exist yet, all programs shown here will potentially not work (though I am working on one)
B i n a r y
We'll start off by printing B i n a r y, because not only is it functionally the same as a Hello, World! program, but I also get to show off cells.
10010000111010100100001100100001011111101101111111111111111111000110010000101001100100001111111111111000110010101000111000111111111111100011
Note: This only writes "B i n " and sets cell 255 to 32 (ASCII value for space) so far.