Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
Two questions: 1: did you actually make ~ATH, and 2: what was that Sburb text-game that you mentioned on an ask on another blog
While I was back in highschool (iirc?) I made a thing which I titled “drocta ~ATH”, which is a programming language with the design goals of:
1: being actually possible to implement, (and therefore, for example, not having things be tied to the lifespans of external things)
2: being Turing complete, and accept user input and produce output for the user to read, such that in principle one could write useful programs in it (though it is not meant to be practical to do so).
3: matching how ~ATH is depicted in the comic, as closely as I can, with as little as possible that I don’t have some justification for based on what is shown in the comic (plus the navigation page for the comic, which depicts a “SPLIT” command). For example, I avoid assuming that the language has any built-in concept of numbers, because the comic doesn’t depict any, and I don’t need to assume it does, provided I make some reasonable assumptions about what BIFURCATE (and SPLIT) do, and also assume that the BIFURCATE command can also be done in reverse.
However, I try to always make a distinction between “drocta ~ATH”, which is a real thing I made, and “~ATH”, which is a fictional programming language in which it is possible to write programs that e.g. wait until the author’s death and the run some code, or implement some sort of curse that involves the circumstantial simultaneous death of two universes.
In addition, please be aware that the code quality of my interpreter for drocta ~ATH, is very bad! It does not use a proper parser or the like, and, iirc (it has probably been around a decade since I made any serious edits to the code, so I might recall wrong), it uses the actual line numbers of the file for the control flow? (Also, iirc, the code was written for python 2.7 rather than for python 3.) At some point I started a rewrite of the interpreter (keeping the language the same, except possibly fixing bugs), but did not get very far.
If, impossibly, I got some extra time I wouldn’t otherwise have that somehow could only be used for the task of working on drocta ~ATH related stuff, I would be happy to complete that rewrite, and do it properly, but as time has gone on, it seems less likely that I will complete the rewrite.
I am pleased that all these years later, I still get the occasional message asking about drocta ~ATH, and remain happy to answer any questions about it! I enjoy that people still think the idea is interesting.
(If someone wanted to work with me to do the rewrite, that might provide me the provided motivation to do the rewrite, maybe? No promises though. I somewhat doubt that anyone would be interested in doing such a collaboration though.)
Regarding the text based SBURB game, I assume I was talking about “The Overseer Project”. It was very cool.
Thank you for your questions. I hope this answers it to your satisfaction.