literally illiterate

This is a langjam submission (so, this will probably have typos and definitely has shoddy code).

Play with the REPL here.

What?

langjam is like a game-jam, but for languages. Participants are given a theme. 48-hours after they are given the theme, they must write and submit a language that fits this theme.

langjam001's theme was 'first-class comments'.

A language with 'first-class comments' can mean many things. I chose to interpret it quite literally. In literally illiterate, you send comments to citizens sitting in first class of an airplane. A comment is not a programming comment (like //), but rather a remark. A valid comment would be, you dress well.

Each citizen likes a certain type of comment. kanye, for example, likes compliments. If you send a comment to a citizen, and they like it, they will evaluate your code.

> kanye, you look beautiful tonight "3"
3

If they don't like it however, they will ignore you.

Citizens & Their Likes

• kanye likes compliments
• linus likes to read hackernews headlines
• socrates likes questions
• tina likes a joke with a punchline

Syntax

<citizen>, <comment> "<code>"

Ownership

Each citizen 'owns' a facet of the language. So not only do they have to like your comment, you have to make sure your <code>'s type is owned by them.

• kanye is literal (3 'text' true false)
• linus operates (+ - / *)
• tina does comparisons (and or > < <= >=)
• socrates decides (if else)

So, if you send a literal to tina, your literal will not be evaluated.

$ tina, setup? punchline! "3"
tina does not own construct "literal"

Chaining

Basic one-liner:

<citizen>, <comment> "<code>"

You can also chain statements together to do math

$ <citizen>, <comment> "+"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "2"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "3"

Or to do an if else

$ <citizen>, <comment> "if else"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "true"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "5"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "3"

The first item in an if else is the condition. The next is the result if the condition is true. Last is what gets executed if the condition is false.

This can be more complex like so

$ <citizen>, <comment> "if else"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "<"
    	| <citizen>, <comment> "5"
    	| <citizen>, <comment> "10"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "*"
    	| <citizen>, <comment> "2"
    	| <citizen>, <comment> "2"
	| <citizen>, <comment> "/"
    	| <citizen>, <comment> "+"
        	| <citizen>, <comment> "4"
        	| <citizen>, <comment> "6"
    	| <citizen>, <comment> "2"

If transpiled to javascript, this code would look like this

if (5 < 10) {
	2 * 2
} else {
	(4 + 6) / 2
}

Both above expressions would result in 5.

Examples

See more examples

Building locally

Check the README.md in each sub-directory for notes on running.

> deno --version
deno 1.12.2
> node --version
v14.15.5

Notes

• The inference engine (the thing that turns a comment into a label, like compliment) can be hit or miss as this was the first language model I've trained.
  • (if you also are new, I highly recommend Hugging face. It's extremely easy to get something out the door)
• Compliments are very underrepresented in dataset.