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The Shakespeare Programming Language
Erik Tjernlund writes: "Oh, where art thou my lovely new programming language? Stop fiddling around with those perl magnets and use a real poetic computer language: The Shakespeare Programming Language. Not a compiler, but it converts to C. Cool 100+ line Hello World example. Amazing what CompSci-students can create when they really should do real work."
combines the best features of BASIC, assembly language, and Hamlet.
Let me guess. It takes three long, boring hours to figure out (2b | !2b)?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Site is dying fast - here's the only thing anyone cares about ...
The Infamous Hello World Program.
Romeo, a young man with a remarkable patience.
Juliet, a likewise young woman of remarkable grace.
Ophelia, a remarkable woman much in dispute with Hamlet.
Hamlet, the flatterer of Andersen Insulting A/S.
Act I: Hamlet's insults and flattery.
Scene I: The insulting of Romeo.
[Enter Hamlet and Romeo]
Hamlet:
You lying stupid fatherless big smelly half-witted coward!
You are as stupid as the difference between a handsome rich brave
hero and thyself! Speak your mind!
You are as brave as the sum of your fat little stuffed misused dusty
old rotten codpiece and a beautiful fair warm peaceful sunny summer's
day. You are as healthy as the difference between the sum of the
sweetest reddest rose and my father and yourself! Speak your mind!
You are as cowardly as the sum of yourself and the difference
between a big mighty proud kingdom and a horse. Speak your mind.
Speak your mind!
[Exit Romeo]
Scene II: The praising of Juliet.
[Enter Juliet]
Hamlet:
Thou art as sweet as the sum of the sum of Romeo and his horse and his
black cat! Speak thy mind!
[Exit Juliet]
Scene III: The praising of Ophelia.
[Enter Ophelia]
Hamlet:
Thou art as lovely as the product of a large rural town and my amazing
bottomless embroidered purse. Speak thy mind!
Thou art as loving as the product of the bluest clearest sweetest sky
and the sum of a squirrel and a white horse. Thou art as beautiful as
the difference between Juliet and thyself. Speak thy mind!
[Exeunt Ophelia and Hamlet]
Act II: Behind Hamlet's back.
Scene I: Romeo and Juliet's conversation.
[Enter Romeo and Juliet]
Romeo:
Speak your mind. You are as worried as the sum of yourself and the
difference between my small smooth hamster and my nose. Speak your
mind!
Juliet:
Speak YOUR mind! You are as bad as Hamlet! You are as small as the
difference between the square of the difference between my little pony
and your big hairy hound and the cube of your sorry little
codpiece. Speak your mind!
[Exit Romeo]
Scene II: Juliet and Ophelia's conversation.
[Enter Ophelia]
Juliet:
Thou art as good as the quotient between Romeo and the sum of a small
furry animal and a leech. Speak your mind!
Ophelia:
Thou art as disgusting as the quotient between Romeo and twice the
difference between a mistletoe and an oozing infected blister! Speak
your mind!
[Exeunt]
Server, server, whereforeart thou, server?
Deny thy slashdotting and accept mine HTTP connects!
5 comments and I can't seem to connect. mayhap I shall bite my thumb at RoadRunner?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
Thus it is revealed that "Much Ado About Nothing" is actually a polynomial time solver of the "Love Triangle" subclass of NP-complete problems.
You were eaten by a grue.
Shakespeare used the common language of his day. Like The Sopranos, Shakespeare's oevure is meant to be a big hit.
His writing is not a language or a diction or a dialect unto itself, but to combine the ways of speaking of the poor and rich playgoers of the Elizabethan time. It's the original accessible style, and that is why 15 year olds can understand, and dig, Romeo and Juliet today.
However, this "speak your mind" crap de-shakespearizes the writing anyway. The topics may be shakespearean, but the diction is a geek-ized bastardization of Elizabethan speech.
This era's English is as complex as our own. The best way to code in such a language understandably is to write simple prose.
For coding, you need a more modular language, something less complex. The semi-linguistic grunts and signs of a Neanderthal, or Koko the signing ape,may be more useful. You would get compilable code, due to a simpler logix, and the Neanderthal observer would still understand the meanings.
Goat sex free since 2001
On April 1, 2000, an RFC was released on IMPS, the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite, which is a means of keeping track of an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters to see if they duplicate the works of Shakespear (or any other works for that matter). The RFC is located at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2795.txt.
RFC 2795 specified that the entity which stores the works of Shakespear (and everyone else) is the Big Annex of Reference Documents (BARD) and communicates with the ZOO (Zone Operation Organization) vie the InterAnnex Message Broadcasting Protocol for Evaluating Neo-classical Transcripts (IAMB-PENT).
Anyway, my point is that this new language is great because what other language would you want to write an implimentation of IAMB-PENT in than Shakespear? Soon we will have another Linux groups try to demonstrate this important protocol like they did with RFC 1149!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Assuming this isn't a complete joke...
David Touretzky would probably get a kick out of this language, since it could lead to a dramatic rendition of a CSS descrambler.
Natural-language programming has had its ups and downs over the year. Some will recall Hypertalk, for example, as the language the original Myst game was programmed in. Only some will recall, however, inasmuch as it never got terribly far off the ground. Other natural languages haven't faired much better.
My contention, however, is that these efforts have not failed because the idea of natural-language programming is somehow fundamentally flawed. Nay, the problem is that we're busy trying to implement the wrong language: English. English may be the language lots of us speak, but it's simultaneously too imprecise to permit of exacting programming and too verbose to allow structures to be implemented quickly and cleanly.
Tok Pisin would make a much better natural language to implement. It has several important advantages over English:
As yet, a language like Tok Pisin would encounter much opposition among programmers and speakers in the population at large unaccustomed to change, but it's a proposal deserving of serious examination.
Not a compiler, but it converts to C.
Well, technically, the tool that translates one language to another (be it to machine language, intermediate language, or just another sufficiently different high level language) is called compiler. Therefore, calling it non-compiler would be incorrect.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
"Amazing what CompSci-students can create when they really should do real work."
Like Linux?
Another natural language language is Chef. Programs are written like cooking recipies. The above link has examples of a Hello World and a Fibonacci sequence generator. I wouldn't want to eat either of them, though. The ingredients are the variable names, so some of the concoctions sound downright nasty. Although, the Fibonacci generator only requires 100g flour, 250 g butter, and one egg, and it's accompanying Caramel Sauce (the recursive function) requires a cup of white sigar, a cup of brown sugar, and a single vanilla bean.
This is not a Fugazi
Um, what's the point? Why would you bother to go from a language that nobody speaks to another (theoretically "natural") language that nobody speaks?
fuck that. ebonic would be a much better programming language.
int foo()
{
word up, biatch;
homey = sup();
}
We didn't expect the slashdot effect (well, not so soon anyway ;-), and our WikiWiki certainly didn't, so the web server died.
So, we set up some temporary, but not complete mirrors. The source, documentation and examples are here, but it lacks the lively and lovely Wiki discussion.
http://spl.pu240.com
http://cgi.student.nada.kth.se/~d98-jas/shakespear e/
--Jon Åslund (one of the authors)
...will there be a version letting one write in the original Klingon?
I wonder what the MPAA would do if 2600 published DeCSS translated into one of these languages.
I dunno. That site consists of a bunch of people with a REALLY good sense of humor, or complete and blithering lunatics. Articles about how you should traumatize cattle so the meat tastes good!? I don't want to take it seriously, but I got the impression that several of the posters there do. I'm a bit unsettled by that.
But, given that their main poll had 137 votes, I guess most people have already voted with their [metaphorical] feet.
Just because something uses C as its output language doesn't mean it's not a compiler. If it scans and parses text to build an abstract syntax tree like a duck, then generates intermediate code which gets optimized like a duck, then outputs the result in some target language like a duck, then it's a duck, regardless of which target language is used.
C is actually quite a popular output language for compilers, because it means they don't have to do register allocation.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Short-sightedness on the part of our story poster here. I think natural language processing, or at least work in its direction is "real work". Especially since if computers are going to be fully (in the sense of casual use the same as a telephone) adopted by our society in the future, they'll have be more human-compatable. (For those on /. that didn't realize it already, most average people are still afraid of PC's.)
When you can dictate instructions to your machine - whether it's 16th century English, or modern Nihongo - the world will be a better place. Steps like this will help lead us to the elimination of these primative and clunky UI's and I/O devices we're currently attached to in favor of elegant, natural communication. Age of intelligent machines, anyone?
Why bother.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I just love these funny languages. Nobody will ever use them, but after reading this, you don't feel like programming any more. The C language looks so crude, so cryptic, so non-human friendly after that...
There's a similar project for Perl called Lingua::Romana::Perligata . This is an awesome module written by Damian Conway, that let you program in Latin. Totally crazy.
{{.sig}}
thk writes "Sistina, the main developer of the Global File System, has changed its language from C to SPL (Shakespeare Programming Language). SPL is basically a language to make the source code for programs written with it, resemble a Shakespeare play. Interestingly, the change came just after beta testing, leaving some users a bit miffed. The GFS is an important component of some GPL clustering projects, such as Compaq's SSIC project. The Sistina press release is here."
Weird. Really weird.
About 3000 if they stay at their keyboards. About 200 if they sit around and masturbate and throw poo.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Duck == Compiler
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Incredible language, by the way. Really really nifty, and something I will use as an example when I'm trying to define the term "hacker".
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien