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Inflexión
| Paradigm(s) | imperative, natural-language–based, inflection-driven |
|---|---|
| Designed by | User:Ramonchis |
| Appeared in | 2026 |
| Computational class | Turing complete |
| Major implementations | Inflexión Python interpreter |
| Influenced by | Perligata, Wenyan, Tampio, Espro |
| File extension(s) | .infl |
Inflexión is a hand-built esoteric programming language whose surface syntax flows from the morphological features of Rioplatense Argentine Spanish. Six grammatical-semantic mappings carry the language's semantic load: number (singular vs. plural article–noun agreement) selects scalar vs. collection cells; mood (indicative / subjunctive / imperative) selects eager binding vs. deferred clauses vs. side effects; aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) selects eager vs. lazy evaluation; the ser/estar split selects immutable vs. mutable bindings; clitic ordering (the fixed Spanish enclitic sequence se-te-me-lo-le) routes function arguments by position; and diminutive / augmentative morphology scales numeric values and selects cheap variants of named functions.
A program in Inflexión that reads as Spanish prose to a Spanish-speaking reader is, simultaneously, a program in which those grammatical features determine what the program does. The dialect is Rioplatense (Argentine), with vos-form verbs throughout (decí, hacé, hablá, escuchá).
Inflexión joins a small lineage of inflection-driven, non-English natural-language esolangs: Lingua::Romana::Perligata (Latin, Damian Conway, 2000), Espro (Esperanto, 2015, idea-only), Tampio (Finnish, Iikka Hauhio, ~2017–present), and Wenyan (Classical Chinese, Lingdong Huang, 2019). It is the first member of that lineage to use a living Romance language.
Hello, world
El saludo es "Hola, mundo". Decilo.
Decilo is the vos-imperative of decir (to say) with the third-person direct-object clitic lo enclitic, dereferencing the most-recent binding.
Computational class
Turing-complete. The witness is a Brainfuck interpreter (~3000 characters of Inflexión) included in the example corpus; it runs the canonical 106-character Hello, World! BF program end-to-end. The Python implementation imposes a configurable 100,000-iteration safety cap on mientras loops; programs that intentionally iterate without bound terminate with a runtime error when the cap fires.
Implementation
The reference implementation is a Python interpreter (Apache 2.0) at github.com/Roderick-Consulting-Inc/inflexion. The lexer combines spaCy's es_core_news_sm Spanish morphological model with a custom rule layer for Rioplatense vos-imperatives, enclitic clitic stacks (Transferíselo, Dámelo), the ordinal-positional suffix -ésimo for list indexing, and the diminutive/augmentative suffix table. The parser is hand-written recursive-descent; the interpreter is big-step recursive over the AST.
A live web playground is at babel.roderickc.com, with the example programs runnable from the Inflexión tab.
External resources
A full description of the language — the six mappings, worked examples (Hello, World, cat, truth machine, FizzBuzz, recursive Fibonacci, quicksort, the BF interpreter), the dialect-choice argument, and the Turing-completeness argument — is in the external design paper.
- Design paper (the language proposal and the six mappings, CC-BY 4.0): roderickc.com/inflexion/white-paper
- Operational semantics (formal specification, CC-BY 4.0): roderickc.com/inflexion/operational-semantics
- Source code (Python interpreter, Apache 2.0): github.com/Roderick-Consulting-Inc/inflexion
- Live playground (in-browser interpreter): babel.roderickc.com