episode1-4.txt

Fourth episode! I'm building a programming language/environment from scratch while recording myself. Watch me struggle figuring out the bootstrapping! Some philosophical stuff in there, like a read being a write and a write being a read. Today, I play Alphaville's Forever Young (at zero volume to avoid copyright infringement...).

github.com/altocodenl/cell

1 "zeroes and ones"
2 "groupings of zeroes and ones"
3 characters
4 text
5 "structured data"


localStorage getItem
             setItem

dataspace at t: call: dataspace at t + 1

Perhaps every call modifies the dataspace.

var makeCall = function (call) {
   var dataspace = localStorage.getItem ('cell');
   if (dataspace === null) dataspace = '';
   // Send the call to actual cell

   localStorage.setItem ('cell', updatedDataspace);
}

Manual mode, example 1:

Call: @ get foo

Dataspace: ""

Response: ""

Manual mode, example 2:

Call: @ set foo bar

Dataspace: ""

Dataspace updated to: foo bar

Response: OK

Manual mode, example 3: @ get foo

Dataspace: foo bar

Response: bar

@ destination message
= response

Dissecting what I do manually:

- Assume that input only has one line
- I split the line by their spaces.

call "@ get foo"
parsed 1 @
       2 get
       3 foo

What is a well formed call?
1 "First element is ""@"""
2 "Second element is either ""get"" or ""set"""
3 "If second element is get, no other requirements"
4 "If second element is set, no other requirements"

@ get: gets entire dataspace
@ set: sets the entire dataspace to ""
@ set foo: sets the entire dataspace to foo
@ set foo bar: sets the entire dataspace to foo bar

Basic manual implementation

- @ get, no third element in the call: respond with the entire dataspace
- @ get and there are more elements in the call, find them.
   - Go line by line on the dataspace.
   - If the line starts with the message (the third, fourth, etc. elements of the call joined by a space), take that line, remove the message from it plus one space, and make that the response.

dataspace:
"alphaville 1969
foo bar"

(Note: we have, we will support multiline text)

@ get
- First line: no match ("alphaville 1969")
- Second line: match! ("foo bar"). We take "foo bar", remove "foo " and get "bar".
- We put "bar" in the response ("current call =").


foo bar
    whatever
something else
foo whatever