bqn-libs VS pdp11.jl

Languages with multidimensional arrays (APL, BQN, J, but not K) have trouble with dicts because an index into an array is a list of numbers, and an index into a dict is an arbitrary value. Many primitives, and especially selection, are designed around lists of numbers and don't transfer to dicts. In K, where the index into a list is one number, there's still a requirement that the keys in a dict all have the same level of nesting, but this isn't bad in practice. BQN will eventually have hashmaps implemented as in a more mainstream/conventional way, as objects. There's a model at https://github.com/mlochbaum/bqn-libs/blob/master/hashmap.bq... .

I don't think studying the compiler is a very good way to learn BQN, but I would like to write up parts of it (limited by time and motivation of course). I did some chat sessions on this sort of compilation during early development; see the links at the bottom of https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/ .

- No debugging at all. You run the code and pray for the best.

A year after we started my classmate decided to drop the project since he felt he couldn't keep up with the complexity: each line of code was non-trivial and really hard to understand.

Eventually we had to rewrite the whole project because GNUs interpreter didn't support big integers, and trying to circumvent that resulted in very poor performance. The new version was written in Julia (https://github.com/emlautarom1/Julia_Simulator), so we were able to reuse a lot of "array code". The project got cancelled in the middle of the rewrite and we kind of forgot about it.