Talk:A-DU

Speculative Suggestions

I'm a fan of Linear A, plus I'm a fan of partially-usable esolangs, so take or leave these suggestions!

Aaaaaaand: My apologies -- the following completely ignores your cell-based structure, and that's my bad.

• Thought: A-DU has ten commodity types. Can those types be overloaded with actual program-type definitions?
  • e.g. Argiculturals are numerics. My lazy preference is for arbitrary range and precision (implemented with lists perhaps).
  • e.g. TELA 'cloth' is a character.
  • e.g. Liquids are file types, perhaps text (OLE) and binary (VIN).

• A-DU could use something that redirects output to a file. For example, what if SA-RA₂ OLE 1 redirects output to a file (creating it if needed) named "SA-RA₂"...

• A-DU really could use a list operator. A big assumption is that the "give" root verb in the Libation Formula is I-ZU. It's a huge assumption based solely and thinly on the similarity of TA-NA-I-*301 with I-NA-TA-I-ZU, and the huge assumption that the inscriber may have inadvertently switched NA-TA- for TA-NA. But let's go with that. Since I'm making wild speculations, then let me call that the list composer and thus:

<label> I-ZU TELA <list of TELA go here>

So declaring a list of characters:

  A-TA I-ZU TELA HELLO, WORLD!\n    ~ A-TA, a-list of-char (H E L L O , <sp> W O R L D ! <nl>)

Or just printing one out:

  KU-RO I-ZU TELA HELLO, WORLD!\n   ~ print a-list of-char ...

Or:

  SA-RA₂  OLE  1                    ~ redirect stdout to a textfile named SA-RA₂.txt
  KU-RO I-ZU TELA HELLO, WORLD!     ~ print a-list of-char
          OLE  0                    ~ close file and reset stdout to console

Washi (talk) 16:13, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions and taking a look at this old idea of mine! It's been a while since I last looked at this, but if I remember correctly I was trying to make a low level style language, effectively a bf clone but so obfuscated by the theme it'd be hard for anyone to notice at first glance :) The idea was to take other languages' increment/decrement abstract counters to increment and decrement literal stocks, of oil, wine, or hides .... for computational purposes. I'll need to refresh my memory on whether I had specific ideas on what the different commodity types were meant to represent. Decrementing and incrementing on different sides of the tablet was an important idea -- using code layout rather than different symbols for the two operations, and making more use of the fractional aspects of the quantities was something I wanted to explore further. In my old notes I have fractional approximations of Pi written down, so maybe there was going to be some more advanced maths? Using personal names from places is possibly another area I didn't fully develop.

Anyway, I was surprised when I read this page there was no link to an interpreter, because I was pretty sure I had one. I just found it on an old laptop and uploaded it if you want to have a play around: https://github.com/hornc/ADU it may not be complete, the article does make it sound still work-in-progress, but I think there's enough there to be at least Turing complete?

I like your idea of using the libation formula for something; actually using all these commodities. Lists would be useful. I'd have to refresh my memory on how the tablets work again. Cells I imagined as storage locations in the hold of a ship, maybe a palace, or warehouse building. The idea of a real computation occurring if someone just physically moved all this stuff around according to the tablets appealed to me. I think there are rules to prevent for example goats eating the grain if they are stored together... Now I've found it I'll take another look at the state of the interpreter and see what needs work! Salpynx (talk) 01:52, 24 May 2024 (UTC)