How exactly would one go about downloading and running your ~ATH interpretation? Where can we download it and what is needed to run it?
“Hi! My interpreter is on my github account [here], along with a number of example files.
To run it, you need to have python 2.7 installed. (Other versions of python 2 may also work. I don’t think it quite works in python 3, but running it through a python 2 to python3 converter should probably give you a working python 3 version)
You can get python 2 at https://www.python.org/downloads/ .
The current version of python 2 is 2.7.13 . Currently that python download page has a link directly to the download on it. (If anyone is reading this post much later than January 1 2016 and the page has changed in the meantime, feel free to send me an ask asking where the current download link for python 2 is).
Once you have python 2 installed, download the interpreter from my github, https://github.com/drocta/TILDE-ATH . There should be a green button labeled “Clone or download”. If you click this, one of the options it will give will be “download ZIP” . Choose this option to download a .zip file of all the files for drocta ~ATH.
Unzip these files into a folder somewhere. Put the .~ATH files that you want to run in the same folder. Use python2 to run the python file interp_2.py . The program will then expect you to type in the filename of the .~ATH file you want to run and then press enter once. It will then load and run the ~ATH program. When it has finished running the program, it will say "press enter to close" . (this is so you can see the output of your ~ATH program before it closes, in case you run it in certain ways.). When you press enter, the python program will finish.
More details on how to run interp_2.py, in case you don’t know how to:(I am assuming you are on windows. if this is not the case, please send me another ask. It should work fine on other OSs, but these instructions for how to run interp_2.py with python might be slightly different)once python 2 is installed, if you open the command line, navigate to the folder with interp_2.py, and type “python interp_2.py” (without spaces), it should run it. Alternatively you can double click on the interp_2.py, it will probably work.One potential problem you might have is if you have python3 installed as well as python2. In this case you have to make sure you run it with the right version of python. If you are using the command line,“C:\Python27\python.exe interp_2.py” instead of “python interp_2.py” should probably work.
If any of this is unclear or you want any more help with this, please do not hesitate to send another ask.
I’m very pleased that this is still interesting for people, and am happy to help!
I am planning two features to add.
one us user defined functions.
the second is, uh, it would let you make an object that would have itself as one of its components or one of the component of one of its components etc.?
the third one I am not sure if I think it is dumb yet, but I was thinking maybe functions being objects that you can bifurcate together to make functions.
which would allow for macros kind of?
which of these three features are good ideas, (as in, for each, it is a good idea)?
I couldn't help but notice that out of some of the best things you could do, no link to the download in the sidebar? You may want to do that...
uh, yes. that would be good to do.
I put a link in the about section, but I don't actually know how to put links in the sidebar outside of that.
do you think you could explain that for me?(I am not particularly experienced with tumblr)
EDIT:Nevermind, my friend from school told me where the feature is.
I had written the code for user input a while ago, but apparently it didn't get put on github. And then my local copy got deleted. But I rewrote it today, and I fixed a bug with reverse bifurcation. So it should work now. And I have confirmed that it did indeed get put on github, so I don't need to worry about this happening again.
~ATH is a programming language. A programming language is a language that can be used to write programs in, that can afterwards be run. ~ATH appears in Homestuck, and drocta ~ATH is my attempt at making it a real thing.
drocta ~ATH is limited to what is physically possible of course, because it actually exists. It is also limited to fit well with the comic, and how much of it I have created so far.
As such, so far all the programs that can be written in drocta ~ATH are text only, do not yet accept input (input in progress), and tend to be stupidly long.
It is however capable of computing anything a computer can given enough time and memory.
~ATH is based on objects, and the lives thereof.
For example, in homestuck, there are programs that relate things to the lifespan of a universe, or a person, etc.
Of course, in order to make an interpreter possible, we have to limit ourselves to virtual objects. Ones that do not actually exist.
References to these objects are stored in things called variables. You probably know what these are already, but if you don't, think of a variable as a box that can have a thing in it. Each box has a name. You can say "do something with whatever is in the box called "apple".
In ~ATH, every object is either "alive" or "dead". Note that it is the object that is alive or dead, not the variable that refers to the object.
Now onto the actual syntax!:
Currently(as of build 7), drocta ~ATH has 5 different commands: import, ~ATH(){}, .DIE();, print, and BIFURCATE.
First we will go over the import statement. The import statement has the purpose of creating a new variable and a new object. Unlike other operations that can create a new object, the object created by import is initially unrelated to all of the other objects.
The syntax of the import command is:
import anything other than semicolons here VARIABLENAME;
The things between import and the last space before the semicolon are ignored.
In future versions, the import statement might also do additional things, such as using things from other files. But for now it just initializes variables.
EXAMPLES:
If you wanted to make a new variable called BANANA, and you wanted the reader to know that BANANA is a fruit, you would say:
import FRUIT BANANA;
or you could say
import YELLOW FRUIT BANANA;
The things that go before the variable name don't actually matter, you can say
import ghsdgh hgsdkhg hgksdhg hgskdjg BANANA;
if you wanted.
Now for the next command: The eponymous ~ATH loop!
The syntax of it is as follows:
~ATH(VARNAME){ Some other code goes here }
What this does, is each time the code execution gets to the ~, it checks what the variable in the parentheses is, and then checks the object the variable points to. If the object is alive, it continues. If the object is dead, it skips to after the }. When the Code execution reaches the }, (that is, if it did not skip to after it), it will jump back to the corresponding ~. Code execution will keep going around in this loop until the object pointed to by the variable is not alive. In later versions, there may be an additional requirement that the } be followed by EXECUTE(code here); Where code here can be replaced with ~ATH code, NULL, or possibly a file name. But currently, this is not the case. Now onto the command BIFURCATE!: Bufurcate actually has 2 forms, the standard bifurcate, And the reverse bifurcate. The first of the two has syntax as follows:
BIFURCATE VARNAME1[VARNAME2,VARNAME3];
What this does, is it takes the object pointed to by the first variable, and determines two objects, which are stored in the other two variables. The two objects determined will always be the same for a particular object. If you for example say:
BIFURCATE V1[V2,V3]; V2.DIE(); BIFURCATE V1[V4,V5];
then V4 and V2 will point to the same object, which will be dead.
The other form of the BIFURCATE command has syntax as follows:
BIFURCATE [VAR1,VAR2]VAR3;
This is pretty much the inverse operation. That is, it undoes the other one. If you say for example:
BIFURCATE A[B,C]; BIFURCATE [B,C]D;
then A and D will point to the same object. To be clear, undoing the other is not the only time you can use it. It will take any two objects, and determine an object from those two. If there is already an object for the combination of those two, then that object is the resultant object. If none has been created yet (and the two arent split from something in that order), it will create a new object, which it will put in VAR3.
To be clear, if you say:
BIFURCATE A[B,C]; BIFURCATE [C,B]D;
A and D will NOT point to the same object, unless you create A such that B and C are the same. That is, if you say:
BIFURCATE [Y,Y]A; BIFURCATE A[B,C]; BIFURCATE [C,B]D;
A and D WILL point to the same object, and B and C will both point to the same object as Y (and as each other).
The Final command is print.
print is pretty simple, but its syntax might change somewhat.
Currently the syntax is:
print the text you want to output;
Note the semicolon. the semicolon is important.
So hello world would be
print Hello, World.;
SYNTAX EXPLANATION COMPLETE! PLEASE SUGGEST CLARIFICATIONS IF NECESSARY.
MESSAGE END.
yeah, can i make ~ATH continue to generate variables? like if one part of the program dies it generates another variable? because i've been trying to do that lmfao
Hi. Not sure what you mean by continue to generate variables. If you mean like how in lisp you can like, automatically generate a new variable name and then use that variable name, then no, drocta ~ATH doesn't have a feature like that, but I'm guessing that's not what you mean.
Variables are just like, names in your program. If you want more objects, you can just continue bifurcating objects to get more objects.
drocta ~ATH does not support parallelism or concurrency or whatever (though presumably canonical ~ATH would, in some sense. At least, it appears to handle circumstantial simultaneity.), So, if you are referring to drocta ~ATH, then I'm not sure what you mean when you refer to part of the program dying. Though, given that in canonical ~ATH, there is the expression
[THIS,THIS].DIE();
then it seems like, presumably, it should be possible to have something like
THIS.DIE();
in order to describe part of the program dying (ending), without another part doing so.
But, again, drocta ~ATH does not support anything like that. Feel free to make a fork of it which does though. Please let me know if you do!
Fixed the bug. The problem was that it was seeing
\n}\nD.DIE();
and it was checking if the text up to the next semicolon ended with .DIE() and if it did, using the stuff before the . as the variable name. When it should have been seeing the } and jumping back.
Also there may have been a problem with the {} matching. If so, that was fixed too. It was not the last part to be fixed.
BUT ANYWAY: The bug is fixed now.
runs in python 2.7
If you have a different version of python, and it is incompatible, please tell me. If a sufficient number of people want it in a different python version I might make a version of it for multiple python versions.
@ karkathateseveryonesposts
Anon in that ask was me, not rping as you say but what I meant from computer-exploding code is I was unsure if ~ATH was supposed to crash once running a code like Sollux's. Also, there couldn't be a syntax error as the program crashes if I press enter with no code on it yet.
Ah! My apologies for my misunderstanding, I interpreted the reference to computer exploding scripts combined with your handle to [ justification for why I misinterpreted snipped for brevity].
You don’t type the script in when you run the program. You need to first save the script as a seperate file, and then when you run the interpreter, type in the filename.
The last bit of the interpreter says like
filename=raw_input() filelink=open(filename,'r') script=filelink.read(-1) result_obj=evalScript(script,NULL_obj) raw_input("press enter to close")
I probably should have made it more clearly ask for a file name instead of just having a prompt with no explanation.
(also, wow, this reminds me that this code was written in python 2.7 and not python 3. Maybe I should update it to use python 3? There’s also many other things about it that ought to be improved but it isn’t high on my priorities..)
My ~ATH keeps crashing whenever I run a non-computer exploding code, or if I press enter. Why is this?
Based on the username which recently followed this blog at the same time as I received this ask (which I won't say what it was because you asked this on anon, and haven't received permission), I'd guess that you may be running a different version of ~ATH than the one I document here :P
Unfortunately, I don't have a specification for the version you have.
If you have such a specification, or the executable for it, I'd be happy to take a look if you could send it to me, haha.
If on the off chance you are using the version I document here, then presumably you have a syntax error or something in your code?
Heyho, I now red alot of your sources and i started to understand your interpretation of ~ATH. You do alot of things with the bifurcate command.. I actually thought that bifrucate JUST splits the programm in different colors like here : "bifurcate THIS[THIS(red), THIS(blue)]; " I think that you can actually split your script into N colors while N > 0. like this: bifrucate THIS[THIS(COLOR(0),THIS(COLOR(1),THIS(COLOR(2),THIS(COLOR(3),THIS(COLOR(4),THIS(COLOR(5),THIS(COLOR(6)] and so on.
Yes. I do use BIFURCATE often.
Personally, I doubt that one could say
BIFURCATE A[D,B,C]; (for some names and colors for a b c and d),
because of the "Bi" part of the word "bifurcate", meaning two. (or in some cases, "both")
Further, I would defend my use of it to BIFURCATE things other than THIS with http://mspaintadventures.com/?viewmap=6 which, for the start of act 5, says
BIFURCATE ACT_5[red(ACT_1), blue(ACT_2)];
which seems to indicate that things other than THIS can be BIFURCATED.
To split something into more than 2 parts, I would just bifurcate it multiple times. *
I don't know what the etiquette is for whether I should click publish or answer privately, so I am going to pick one and hope for the best.
Learn ~ATH turned 1 today!
yaaaay!
So I think that my explanations of things hasn't been very clear so far, and while I can't promise that they will improve, I do intend to teach programming in person at my school, which might help me to know how to make this tutorial better. Maybe, maybe not.
May things go well!
when we left off, we had code to interpret one binary number from user input, and output it as a unary number. In this post we will add the second user input, and maybe make a thing that converts from unary to binary, and then outputs it.
The code for that was the following:
import blah BLAH; print please enter whatever character you will be using for binary zero.; INPUT ZEROCHAR; BIFURCATE ZEROCHAR[ZEROCHAR,JUNK]; import chrcmp CMP0; BIFURCATE [CMP0,ZEROCHAR]D; D.DIE(); print please enter whatever character you will be using for binary one.; INPUT ONECHAR; BIFURCATE ONECHAR[ONECHAR,JUNK]; import chrcmp CMP1; BIFURCATE [CMP1,ONECHAR]D; D.DIE(); BIFURCATE [NULL,NULL]2NULL; BIFURCATE 2NULL[OUTNUM,JUNK]; print please input the binary number you want.(it will be converted to unary); INPUT BINNUM; ~ATH(BINNUM){ BIFURCATE [OUTNUM,OUTNUM]G; BIFURCATE G[NCOPY,OUTNUM]; ~ATH(NCOPY){ BIFURCATE NCOPY[JUNK,NCOPY]; BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]OUTNUM; } BIFURCATE BINNUM[CHAR,BINNUM]; BIFURCATE [CMP0,CHAR]NEQ0; ~ATH(NEQ0){ BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]OUTNUM; BIFURCATE 2NULL[NEQ0,JUNK]; } } print ok, going to print it out in unary, with each digit on one line. If the number you entered was large you might want to close the program instead of hitting enter.; INPUT JUNK; BIFURCATE [OUTNUM,OUTNUM]GOUTNUM; BIFURCATE GOUTNUM[OUTNUMCOPY,JUNK]; ~ATH(OUTNUMCOPY){ BIFURCATE OUTNUMCOPY[JUNK,OUTNUMCOPY]; print 1; }
ok, so what do we need to do after that?
Well we need to make it get two numbers, right?
Yes. Yes we do.
But getting one number was kind of long, wasn't it.
Luckily we don't have to have the entire thing there twice, much of it we can jusst have it in there once.
we COULD define a function, but I haven't added that to the interpreter yet, so yeah...
so a significant portion of that was initialization stuff that doesn't need to be duplicated. the first 14 lines in fact!
so pretty much we just duplicate everything but the first 14 lines.
gee, now I sound lazy for not writing this part earlier.
anyway, here goes:
import blah BLAH;
print please enter whatever character you will be using for binary zero.;
INPUT ZEROCHAR;
BIFURCATE ZEROCHAR[ZEROCHAR,JUNK];
import chrcmp CMP0;
BIFURCATE [CMP0,ZEROCHAR]D;
D.DIE();
print please enter whatever character you will be using for binary one.;
INPUT ONECHAR;
BIFURCATE ONECHAR[ONECHAR,JUNK];
import chrcmp CMP1;
BIFURCATE [CMP1,ONECHAR]D;
D.DIE();
BIFURCATE [NULL,NULL]2NULL;
BIFURCATE 2NULL[OUTNUM,JUNK];
print please input the first binary number you want.(it will be converted to unary);
INPUT BINNUM;
~ATH(BINNUM){
BIFURCATE [OUTNUM,OUTNUM]G;
BIFURCATE G[NCOPY,OUTNUM];
~ATH(NCOPY){
BIFURCATE NCOPY[JUNK,NCOPY];
BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]OUTNUM;
}
BIFURCATE BINNUM[CHAR,BINNUM];
BIFURCATE [CMP0,CHAR]NEQ0;
~ATH(NEQ0){
BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]OUTNUM;
BIFURCATE 2NULL[NEQ0,JUNK];
}
}
BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]UINNUM1;
BIFURCATE UINNUM1[JUNK,UINNUM1];
BIFURCATE 2NULL[OUTNUM,JUNK];
print input the second binary number:;
INPUT BINNUM;
~ATH(BINNUM){
BIFURCATE [OUTNUM,OUTNUM]G;
BIFURCATE G[NCOPY,OUTNUM];
~ATH(NCOPY){
BIFURCATE NCOPY[JUNK,NCOPY];
BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]OUTNUM;
}
BIFURCATE BINNUM[CHAR,BINNUM];
BIFURCATE [CMP0,CHAR]NEQ0;
~ATH(NEQ0){
BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]OUTNUM;
BIFURCATE 2NULL[NEQ0,JUNK];
}
}
BIFURCATE [BLAH,OUTNUM]UINNUM2;
BIFURCATE UINNUM2[JUNK,UINNUM2];
BIFURCATE [UINNUM1,UINNUM1]CUINNUM1;
BIFURCATE CUINNUM1[SUM,JUNK];//haha, some junk
BIFURCATE [UINNUM2,UINNUM2]CUINNUM2;
BIFURCATE CUINNUM2[UINNUM2CPY,JUNK];
~ATH(UINNUM2CPY){
BIFURCATE UINNUM2CPY[JUNK,UINNUM2CPY];
BIFURCATE [BLAH,SUM]SUM;
}
print ok, going to print the sum out in unary, with each digit on one line. If the numbers you entered were large you might want to close the program instead of hitting enter.;
INPUT JUNK;
BIFURCATE [SUM,SUM]GSUM;
BIFURCATE GSUM[SUMCOPY,JUNK];
~ATH(SUMCOPY){
BIFURCATE SUMCOPY[JUNK,SUMCOPY];
print 1;
}
ok. That worked. I haven't made it convert the output to binary yet. I started this the day of the other post, but there was a bug I didnt get around to fixing in it that I didn't find the fix for until today.
that bug was that in the part where it changes the binary number to a unary number, the first time around, the unary number starts at zero and increases to what it should be...
...but I forgot to include the line to reset it back to zero for the second number.
but in works now.
I might make the part where it converts from unary to binary now instead of later, but I have to do stuff.
Sorry for having such a slow post rate, it is partly because I am busy and partly because I am lazy. mostly the [FORMER,LATTER].
hey, it adds the numbers that were entered in binary...
So a future improvement is to make it so it outputs it in binary as well.
Another possible future post is something that shouldn't work but the interpreter has a certain bug that might be amusing, and will not negatively affect many things.
specifically, if you have a "}" inside of a print statement, and you are jumping to the end of a loop, it will jump to the inside of the print statement, and execute the text as code. This is a bug, not a feature, so you should not rely on it when writing stuff. It might be fun to mess with though.
I might add user defined functions to the interpreter soon...
I don't feel that this post really explained much of anything, but I have to do stuff now, so I am going to post this, and possibly modify it later with clarifications.
Feel free to send me messages asking about how some part works.
News and tutorials on drocta ~ATH by drocta. interpreter here A brief summary of how to write code in the language (but also see the table of contents)
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