Cat's Eye Technologies: New Developments

Some Facts Regarding Apple Befunge v1.1

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:44:01 GMT

February 20, 2012: Pixley and Falderal. Falderal and Pixley. I know, I know, it's all you've been hearing about for the past three months, you poor thing. But now, O eso-pilgrim, well may you frolic and jubilate! I bring news of something closer to the weird. After more than a decade, some well-deserved updates have been made to Apple Befunge, that ol' "retrolanguage" for the Apple ][+, and it has been placed in the public domain.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/apple-befunge/

I got Pixley power!

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 01:12:15 GMT

February 19, 2012: Pixley version 2.0 revision 2012.0219 has been released. There are no changes to the language, but there are a few significant improvements to the supporting tools and tests, and a few to the implementation, and a bevy of minor dialects of Pixley have been defined for purposes of Scheme-ly tar-pit research. Oh, and it's been officially placed under a BSD-style license now. Enjoy...

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/pixley/

Release of Falderal version 0.6 "Streeterville"

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:45:16 GMT

January 2, 2012: The new year sees another release of Falderal, our framework for writing literate test suites for languages. This version supports variable expansion in functionality specifiers and the ability to add and remove functionality specifiers on the command line. It also fixes several bugs and shortcomings in the previous version. And, if you browse around the site a bit, you'll see we've started using it to format our projects' Falderal, Markdown, and Literate Haskell documents to XHTML.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/falderal/

Release of Falderal version 0.5 "The Loop"

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:40:19 GMT

December 14, 2011: Falderal, our format for unit-testing little languages, has seen release of version 0.5 "The Loop". As you can see, we have adopted a naming convention for release milestones — they're named after Chicagoland neigbourhoods, suburbs, landmarks, and institutions. This version was named after The Loop in recognition of its ability to shuttle test results between falderal and the various results generators implemented in different languages (Haskell, Bourne shell scripts) and to report on all the failures in a consistent way.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/falderal/

Release of Pixley version 2.0

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:18:14 GMT

December 9, 2011: Pixley version 2.0 has been released. It removes cadr and null? from the language. Partly because of this, the reference interpreter is now somewhat simpler: 124 lines of Pixley, with 407 instances of 53 unique symbols in 672 cons cells. The distribution now also includes driver shell scripts, Falderal tests, and a P-Normalizer, probably the first non-trivial Pixley program to be written outside the Pixley interpreter itself.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/pixley/

Madison, a Term-Rewriting Proof-Checker

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:26:43 GMT

December 2, 2011: One thing I've wanted to do for a long while is design a language in which one can state proofs of the properties of programs in that language. Not a full-blown theorem prover, just a proof checker, where you have to supply the proof, and the system tells you if it holds or doesn't hold. And not an immensely powerful proof-checker either, just powerful enough to state some simple proofs which hold over an infinite universe of values.

Well, after much thought and sketching, I have come up with a term-rewriting-based proof-checking language called Madison. It supports both direct proof and proof by structural induction, and I have used it to write a proof that the reflection of the reflection of any binary tree is the same as the original tree. It's not much, but I'm quite pleased with it.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/madison/

Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Flobnar!

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 14:34:04 GMT

October 28, 2011: One day in September of 2011 — though I'm not sure precisely which one — marked Befunge-93's 18th birthday. That means that Befunge is now old enough to drink in its native land of Canada. To celebrate this, I thought I'd get Befunge-93 drunk to see what would happen.

What happened was Flobnar, an esolang which is in many respects a functional dual of Befunge-93; most of the symbols have analogous meanings, but execution proceeds in a much more dataflow-like fashion.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/flobnar/

Release of Falderal version 0.4

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 20:47:03 GMT

October 10, 2011: Well, that was quick — well, we were on a roll. Falderal 0.4 introduces several desirable features. Test.Falderal is a Cabal package now, making installation easier, and this Cabal package installs a tool (unflinchingly called falderal) which drives the formatting and testing processes. Tests are now targetted at abstractions called functionalities, and functionalities are allowed to be implemented in different ways, including as shell commands, supporting the testing of multiple implementations of a function in multiple, essentially arbitrary implementation languages. This all brings Falderal closer to its goal of being a testing framework for programming languages.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/falderal/

Release of Falderal version 0.3

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:30:56 GMT

October 7, 2011: Remember that major change in how Falderal works that we talked about when Falderal 0.2 was released? Well, it's here, in Falderal 0.3. Basically, two things happened. One, Falderal is a file format now, and Test.Falderal is the reference implementation, in Haskell, for tools which claim to understand the format. Two, Test.Falderal is now able to format Falderal files into other formats. In fact, running tests is accomplished by formatting the Falderal file into Haskell code, and running that.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/falderal/

OMG WTF FBBI 1.0 SIAS EVVK!

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:46:30 GMT

October 3, 2011: After years and years of apathy, we have fixed a number of bugs in the Flaming Bovine Befunge-98 Interpreter (FBBI), raising its quality level from "profound embarrassment" all the way to "marginal non-fail". Mainly we did this by randomly applying those patches that have been floating around, for which we owe much gratitude, but there was also a crippling memory-management bug that we found in the stack routines that highly deserved being killed, so, we sure did that thing too.

To celebrate — and to assuage our acquired annoyance at version numbers which look like decimal numbers that are supposed to indicate "close to release" — we have released version 1.0 of FBBI.

Note well that our general apathy towards Funge-98 has not abated in kind.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/fbbi

yoob 0.3 in the Gallery of Interactive Esolangs

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:46:23 GMT

September 21, 2011: yoob 0.3 has been released, and it has moved out of Cat's Eye Technologies' lab and has become an official part of our website. It is now the main exhibit in the new Gallery of Interactive Esolangs. And, since we have three galleries now, we have developed this section of the website into something more real: our Gallery Space. This is where we will be exhibiting interactive works, and works not produced by Cat's Eye Technologies but which we find interesting nonetheless.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/gallery/esolangs/

Have you seen LoUIE lately?

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 21:24:45 GMT

September 17, 2011: Have you seen LoUIE (our List of Unfinished Interesting Esolangs) lately? Because if you haven't, there's likely some designs there you haven't seen, because I just now added three (and in the past, haven't always announced it when I've added new entries.) There are twelve in total now, so if you're looking for an idea to build on, why not give it a look-see?

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/cpressey/louie.html

Researchers Discover the Civilization Advance "Language: Xoomonk"

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:56:59 GMT

August 7, 2011: Xoomonk is a programming language in which malingering updatable stores are first-class objects. Malingering updatable stores unify several language constructs, including procedure activations, named parameters, and object-like data structures. While the language is not yet implemented or even entirely finalized, it is pretty much complete, so is being released as version 0.1.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/xoomonk/

PL-{GOTO}.NET: Eat it Before it Eats You

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 02:53:30 GMT

August 4, 2011: You've always wanted an compiler for the example primitive recursive language PL-{GOTO} from Brainerd and Landweber's Theory of Computation, haven't you? And you have a need for it to generate MSIL which can be fed into ilasm to produce a .NET executable, don't you? And you wouldn't be satisfied unless it were implemented in Haskell, with a true-to-form grammar parsed with a Parsec combinator parser, would you?

...

Why aren't you answering me???

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/pl-goto.net/

Bubble Escape 2K Now Playable Online

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 05:34:50 GMT

July 16, 2011: As subject. We've wanted to do this for a while, but last time an attempt was made, JaC64 was not quite up to the task. So we forked it on Bitbucket and for the past few weeks we've been busy fixing bugs in it. It's still not perfect, but it's playable on several platforms including Windows (Firefox and IE) and Ubuntu 11 (Firefox). So try it! Enjoy!

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/gallery/c64/bubble-escape-2k/

Release of Falderal version 0.2

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 18:40:47 GMT

June 27, 2011: Mainly to get a few minor niceties and bugfixes out of the way before we start on major changes to how Falderal works, Falderal 0.2 has been released. The planned major changes are probably more interesting than the niceties: I hope to make Falderal into something that can test more than just Haskell functions. Of course, it will still be written in Haskell.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/falderal/

First public release of yoob source code

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 04:27:27 GMT

June 24, 2011: yoob has pulled itself out of its "technology preview" stage, and is officially released as open-source software. More specifically, its source code is in the public domain and its development is hosted on a public repository on Bitbucket. Even though the source code is embarrasingly bad, I decided not to care. If you decide to care, you are quite free to hack it into better shape -- there are more than a dozen open issues in its issue tracker.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/yoob/

Corona: Realm of Magic

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 00:17:55 GMT

June 23, 2011: Something else I dug out of the attic. This was an elaborate roguelike I wrote (but never finished) in Perl, circa 2000. Still runs on a modern Perl (v5.10.1), but doesn't play too nicely with my modern terminal emulator. No further development is planned -- it is retained here for historical interest only. It's actually been on the site for a while, but due to some technical problems, was not announced until now.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/corona-realm-of-magic/

Apple Befunge

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:47:35 GMT

June 7, 2011: Hey, look what I dug out of the attic. I don't even remember what emulator the disk image was built for. Oh well.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/apple-befunge/

Pail is an acceptable Bizaaro[sic]-Pixley

Fri, 27 May 2011 14:33:34 GMT

May 27, 2011: If you've been following our news, you've noticed that twenty-eleven's been kind of a light year for new languages here at Cat's Eye Technologies. It's been mostly updates, with the only original design being Wunnel. Well, that pattern's been broke! We have another new language. It started its life under the name Bizaaro[sic]-Pixley, but it's called Pail now (for PAIr Language).

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/pail/

Falderal: Literate Testing for Haskell Functions

Tue, 17 May 2011 23:43:10 GMT

May 17, 2011: We here at Cat's Eye Technologies have decided to stop building new ad-hoc test suite machinery for every new esolang we implement in Haskell. Instead, we have put together a package that can be used and reused for this purpose, and we have (for reasons obscure even to us) called it Falderal. It doesn't do a lot yet (it's only version 0.1...), but it has promise. We're already using it in Quylthulg. To encourage contributions, its development is hosted on a public repository on Bitbucket. Watch for its use in future projects!

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/falderal/

Pluggin' some (specification) leaks in Eightebed

Tue, 10 May 2011 18:59:22 GMT

May 10, 2011: Eightebed version 1.1. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Kind of mellow, with hints of strawberry and creosote on the back of the tongue. And that ring is even nicer when you realize that this update fixes the definition of the language to make it fulfill its original purpose. The concept of the safe area has been limited to statements in a block before the first free statement, thus preventing the creation of aliased dangling references. Thanks to Gregor Richards for pointing out this hole. Also included: a handful of bug and documentation of fixes that you don't care about.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/eightebed/

Oozlybub and Murphy and Progress!

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:37:55 GMT

April 27, 2011: Version 1.1 of the Oozlybub and Murphy programming language has been released. This update tries to clarify some of the errors in the specification while also slathering some extra goo onto it like a wimpmode. Enjoy, then enjoy again, then PLEASE DO KEEP ENJOYING UNTIL YOUR EYES BURN WITH DEEP DEEP CORROSION.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/oozlybub-and-murphy/

More blowing off of dust: Maentwrog

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:00:57 GMT

April 26, 2011: Marinus has been so kind to write documentation and example programs for the ancient and venerable Maentwrog language that I decided I ought to update the distribution to include them -- along with a small fix that allows the source to be build with modern C compilers like gcc and pcc.

Check it out at http://catseye.tc/projects/maentw/