Welcome!
Welcome, Ladies and Gentlemen. Come in! Sit down! Watch and learn! This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how it's done!
Now, if you're sitting comfortably, then I'll begin...
(If I were Jesus, dying on the cross, what would I have said? Thank God it was him instead of me.)
Dear Lord, our Heavenly Father,
I know it is your will, not mine that matters, and that computers are trifling things in your great and glorious plan. But in this little corner of reality, where things are so interestingly sick and twisted that a simple machine built around a few bits of molecularly rearranged sand can actually work, this most stupid of all heavenly ideas has actually found a place in the tapestry where it actually works.
I'm sorry Father, having seen what these computers can do in this corner of the tapestry, I have fallen in love, and have failed to do so with even something one could call human, and I don't care. Why is for another prayer, or maybe a story or parable. The purpose of this prayer is not to ask you, or instruct you, or demand something of you. I have partially worked out, and to my own satisfaction, my recipe for one of my perfect computer languages. I offer it to you in incomplete form so that you may, in your infinite wisdom, correct errors and add more goodies. But I offer it to you lovingly, openly and without any regret in doing so: this language, my God, belongs to you, and into your hands I place it.
Anyway Father, time is short, so I'll begin. My ultimate computer language would start simple, and work itself up. It would have...
(At this point, the grand allocator would kick in, throwing a new NoMoreLifeException("Gotcha! God"); only to be caught by my prewritten responsory program: for you see, in my Dropbox account, the password for which is, well I don't have to explicitly tell you now do I Father, there is a file, written humbly in vi (or vim to be honest, yes even in that I did cheat a little), on a humble terminal (well, a Terminal.app window on a 2008 series iMac with 4GB of RAM... Father I am so sorry for my sin and greed... but it's so shiny!)
--weeps... sortof... by this point, of course, \the\GrandLifeAllocator had already thrown what was meant to be the final exception, and we are in those blocks that in some computer languages get called finally, and of course I forgot in my stupidity to write that into the language, so someone else must do that oh so important detail--
--[ BEGIN FILE dream.lang ]--
Power or forth
Catcode of TeX, but 32bit
Based on 64bit words, not characters
64bit words split into two 32bit forks -- catcode and charcode
charcode can encode ascii using trivial 4char method, or else compression
charcode can encode from small dictionaries of words
I from {I you he she they} 3bit
Will from {will wont do must } 4bit
Love from {love hate} 8bit
You from {you life theUniverse} 8bit
Lots from {aBit, aLot, loads, fuckLoads, otherLoads} 5bit
Eternally from {<how long>} 4bit
- from the doggy bag dictionary (a coded language -- catcode ' dbd')
- message format:
' dbd' xxxx -- He said: 'I will love you lots eternally'
' dbd' yyyy -- She replied: 'I already love you lots now'
-- etc.
indirect and macros of m4, with catcode masking and matching
each catcode provides a dictionary for a charcode
--[ END FILE dream.lang ]--
I did write a better version, possibly on my Acer laptop (no, not the more expensive one with the expensive music software: the cheaper one that exists to run Linux for me in a VirtualBoxVM so as to properly resolve driver difficulties by sacrificing a bit of performance to throw that ball back to Microsoft) but this note is the best I can do for now... you'll have to dispatch an angel to find it.
(Another new OutOfLifeException("WhatNow?") gets thrown, again running in the holy Java VM that God rightly threw down to Earth where not even hell would have the misfortune of having to develop in it.)
(And that is where it gets interesting, for in the code to write stack backtraces, when the universe finally halted, if only to do some garbage collection, we find the following:)
-- SNIP: this bit of debugging info is CENS0R3D ~~~~Minion43 --
(And even for that Father, oh I'm so sorry, I actually had to code and test it in Java just to see how the exception structure could be made to crash like this... hmmm.... I shouldn't have written that, and have not time for backspacing... errm... bugger? escape? escape-key?...)
-- To be continued...
(This fragment is programmed to self destruct on the 31st May, 2013... please ensure it is saved by then.)
Beginners
If you are a Beginner on the Chalisque webiverse, this is the place to start. Absolute Mastery of The Basics is not optional if you want to get far with what you find here. Absolute Mastery of The Basics takes time, as long as it takes, and there are few shortcuts. The Beginners' section will advise you of things to learn, play with and practise so that you become proficient in thinking the way I think and the way my Chalisque webiverse is designed. Then your intuition will lead you to places that few will find. In time, if you persevere, we will come to know each other as friends. So welcome, potential friend, and tread carefully, for 'The Wheels of Fate Cannot Be Turned Once Set In Motion' (quoted from the Might and Magic ]I[ intro).
Intermediates
For those who have Absolute Master ofThe Basics (AMoB), the intermediates section of the site will offer you places to go, things to learn, experiences to enjoy and, in practise, whatever I can get round to putting there for you to find. Things are placed in reasonably easy to find locations, possibly requiring a little human effort to reach: you may, perhaps, need to take a text form of a URL, rearrange it according to instructions embedded in the text to get another URL and then type that either into your URL bar or some kind of text input box as appropriate.
Graduates
Those who have graduated from the learning process are free to go where they can. If you can go somewhere, do something, even break something, it is because I have allowed you to. You cannot violate the underlying principles of this webiverse, though you can make it ugly for yourself if not careful. So Be Careful! (BC!)
