Hi all, I created a useless language I'm calling Concrete github.com/reedspool/concrete-runtime (in-browser interpreter goal-keeper-deborah-51172.bitballoon.com) to explore self-modifying code without variables. I'd love any and all commentary or questions from you smart-cookies! Cheers.

@MartinBüttner I've got a working solution to the count up challenge in hexagony but it's... rather long. I don't have time to golf it right now but if you have any ideas, I'd be glad to hear them :)

@FryAmTheEggman it's a bit tricky to figure out what's going on without a debugger...

Yeah, uh, I copy the number and then decrement it and subtract it from the other and output that followed by a newline repeatedly.

The IP goes E/W most of the time except near the end of the loop.

Hrm, explaining hexagony is hard. I dunno if that's even very helpful...

here's a start for what I would do: hexagony.tryitonline.net/…

looks very golfable

Ah, yeah that works out much better

hexagony.tryitonline.net/…

3x3 is gonna be hard though

Picking where to put < is hard... >_<

yeah

feel free to post it btw, it's still essentially the same solution, just with a slightly different layout.

Idk they are pretty different :P But sure, I'll post it once I'm either sure there isn't a 3 length one (at least that I will find) or I find one

a side-length 3 one might exist, but I doubt a human will find it. some clever search might be able to find it though. it's definitely too large a search space for brute force though.

Couldn't be found by a human you say: hexagony.tryitonline.net/…

:D

whoa, I'm impressed

I used the classic approach of "Try the condition in every spot until you get to reuse something" and it worked out OK, only like 5-6 tries

I'm curious, are all stack-based languages technically esoteric?

Esoteric means that it would only be understood by a select group of people, so I'd say that's true now, but who knows, maybe stack based languages will be mainstream by 2042 :P

@Midnightas I wouldn't call PostScript esoteric, but it is stack-based

Alright, It's just that most stack-based languages I see have commands made up of single bytes.

Most of the APL languages have single byte commands, but in the past I wouldn't have said that they were esoteric

Nah. FORTH isn't esoteric, just obscure or outdated

Even then, there are a suprisingly large amount of people that use FORTH for microcontrollers

@MartinBüttner What does % do in the sort stage? Doesn't seem to be documented :P

@FryAmTheEggman % works on any stage. it's per-line mode

(and I'm pretty sure it's documented)

Oh yeah, it is, I was just looking at the sorting part, my bad >_<

When did you add that? I dunno if I missed it or I've just been living in the dark lol

I think in the same release as limits and sort stages

ah no Sorting was 0.8.1

I added it in 0.8.0

github.com/mbuettner/retina/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#080

Ah ok, I guess I probably missed it being too excited by the new sorting stuff :P

it's really useful for writing test suites

just start the code with %(G`

then the entire program after it will be applied to each line of the input separately

of course, if your program requires implicit opening (, you'll have to add a few to that line

Cool

@FryAmTheEggman retina.tryitonline.net/…

Ah, right non-greedy, thanks :)

I should beef up % some time so that I can make the splitting and rejoining implicit

not entirely sure where to put the regex for that though

That would help with golf, not really sure what you mean by the second bit though

well I'd like to give % a regex to split around instead of just always splitting around \n.

Ah right, makes sense

Well, a bad and lazy way would be to have %`<regex>` or something, I guess

And if % doesn't have a backtick then default to newline

could do something crazy like if there's a second %, the stuff in between is the regex, but that seems pretty tough to get right

but yeah your solution is probably better

although I'm a bit worried about detecting escapes inside the regex

Hmm, both seem to pretty much have the same problems, but idk how you parse the options :P

@MartinBüttner Posted \o/ with a big old wall of text to go with it... :P

I was wondering if it might be golfable by omitting < and using the right-hand corner as a branch

Hmm, feels like you might get messed up, maybe? It was hard to get the IP to get back around to the middle row and then having instructions not to skip when it was supposed to be done.

But you're right that it did feel golfable, I almost posted it in this room with the ; in front of the < which left the whole bottom blank, but then I realized it was printing some unprintables :P

hm, yeah definitely trickier than I thought

I do sometimes wish there was a conditional trampoline, but then I remember that I'm asking to make hexagony easier to use :P

:D

I don't think Hexagony is gonna change at this point

in Lab, I might still assign some meaning to [ and ], but I think Hex will remain as it is

Oh I somehow missed your last comment, I didn't know you were still working on lab at all

And yeah hexagony is fine the way it is :P