specifications VS algebralang

Notice that here I used a convention where names which end with "=" become XML attributes, whereas names which don't become children.

I have used the same convention here (except I don't bother with transforming names with spaces into camelCase): https://github.com/jevko/specifications/blob/master/easyjevk... to generate this HTML file: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jevko/spec...

Now I intend to write specifications that codify conventions like this into different formats based on this fundamental syntax of square brackets.

It can be useful for all kinds of things. Its advantage is extreme simplicity and flexibility.

BTW, for clarity I have to say that the format that I used here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32995047 does a bit more transformations -- it actually sometimes treats whitespace as a separator (e.g. in `svg width[391]` space is a separator). That allows for extreme conciseness, but is not necessary and introduces complexity.

A plain Jevko parser simply turns your unicode sequence into a tree which has its fragments as leaves/labels.

No data types on that level, much like in XML.

Now above that level there is several ways to differentiate between them.

The simplest pragmatic way is a kind of type inference: if a text parses as a number, it's a number, if it's "true" or "false", it's a boolean. Otherwise it's a string. If you know the implicit schema of your data then this will be sufficient to get the job done.

Otherwise you employ a separate schema -- JC in particular has per-parser schemas anyway, so that's covered in this case.

Or you do "syntax-driven" data types, similar to JSON, e.g. strings start w/ "'".

Here is a shitty demo: https://jevko.github.io/interjevko.bundle.html

It shows schema inference from JSON and the schemaless (syntax-driven) flavor.

Jevko itself is stable and formally specified: https://github.com/jevko/specifications/blob/master/spec-sta...

It's very easy to write a parser in any language (I've written one in several) and from there start using it.

However, I am still very much working on specifications for formats above Jevko. I have some recent implementations of the simplest possible format which converts Jevko to arrays/objects/strings:

* https://github.com/jevko/easyjevko.lua

Thank you for your feedback. Can you clarify?

What is the "first page" that you are referring to?

Can you paste a link to it along with the broken examples link?

This Hacker News submission features the blog post under this URL:

https://djedr.github.io/posts/jevko-2022-02-22.html

Clearly, you are not talking about this page, as that contains multiple links rather than a singular link.

Perhaps you are talking about the specification which is here:

https://github.com/jevko/specifications/blob/master/spec-sta...

(linked from the blog post)

and here:

https://jevko.org/spec.html

(linked from jevko.org)

All three link to Jevko examples here:

https://github.com/jevko/examples

but all these examples links seem to be correct on my end.

I agree about the importance of examples, and I try to lead with them on jevko.org and jevko.github.io (which are the front pages of Jevko -- possibly I should merge them into one).

However a formal specification is not necessarily the place to put the leading examples.

This is also where the Subjevko rule is defined. It isn't quite introduced as "known knowledge" -- the purpose of a specification is to define the unknown, more or less from the ground up. This is also why specifications tend to get a little abstract. Jevko's spec is no exception. This should be in line with expectations of authors of tools such as parsers, validators, generators, or other kinds of processors, for which the spec is the authoritative reference.

It is not necessarily the best first place to look for explanation, if you are approaching from a more casual side.

I agree that from that side a clear picture of what Jevko is and how it can be used is still lacking. I certainly should add more examples and explain the concepts with analogies.

So I appreciate the essence of your advice and hope I'll manage to improve on that.

I experiment with programming language theory and designs as a hobby and one of my thoughts is that the core underlying problem of computing is an arrangement problem of a turing machine. Compiling is "planning what you shall do". Execution is "doing". We have the luxury of many ways of doing things in computing. But it all seems to lead to mess of poor understandability and complexity.

What am I trying to say? OOP inheritance hiarchy trees are limited and not what you really want to do to represent your problem. I want to define a situation or scenario and define what should happen in that scenario. This is where asynchronous programming and join calculus shines. I also like occam-pi's select statement and golang's select. I also feel every computing problem is the "expression problem" manifested. How do you associate behaviour (what to do) with a type (a situation)? And how do you define them so you don't have to reimplement all the previously existing behaviours with the new thing?

The next section shall be reductive.

Ultimately all loops, function application, methods, expressions, variables, classes, functions, lists, vectors, data structures, algorithms exist as "things" in the imagination of the developer's mind and the compiler. They don't exist in machine code.

We have a grid of memory locations and the arrangement of things in that grid is handled by a memory allocator. We also have references in this grid as pointers, which form a structure of their own. A turing machine.

Thinking of a type and behaviour as being solely one thing only at a time is inherently limiting. I often want to see different things "as" something else to talk about them in a slightly different approach. A vector or ArrayList of objects of multiple types but processed in the same approach, efficient compile time polymorphism.

This is kind of how I imagine object orientated development to really be about, I want to be capable of referring to an arbitrary selection of objects and define new behaviours or relations between the objects. Unfortunately most OOP ties imperative behaviour and stateful manipulation to data rather than modify exhibited behaviours of objects. Imagine being capable of organising and managing load balancers and draining them and devops architecture with code. A point and click GUI where I can right click a load balancer and click drain. (I don't mean code to bring them up or create them but to actually administrate them with OOP)

I think the expression problem is a core problem of modern computing and doesn't have an efficient solution.

We can decouple data structure, layout and algorithm. Unfortunately most programming languages couple data structure + layout (C) and OOP languages couple algorithm with layout. Functional programming languages I'm not sure about.

I called this idea of software mimicry as branching libraries in my ideas document (link in profile)

I've been working with C++ templates today with C++20 coroutines and multithreading and I am finding template instantiation very interesting. I've been late to come around to it.

This comment mentioned the insight that boxing and template instantiation are related. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14764780

I am also working on a multithreaded programming language which looks similar to Javascript. I use an actor implementation that can send messages between threads.

https://github.com/samsquire/multiversion-concurrency-contro...

One of my programming language designs is the idea that every line of code is a concurrent process and data flow is scheduled by topological sorting. Iteration is handled automatically for you. Every variable is actually a relation and algebraic definition of relations between processes. This is called algebralang. https://github.com/samsquire/algebralang

The idea is that you write the underlying insight into the problem as an expression of what you want to do and let the computer schedule the ordering or arrangement of operations to do it. It's a form of pattern matching on the state of things (objects in the system) and declaration of the desired result. This brings to mind the rete algorithm (expert systems) and differential dataflow.

I began designing a language that handled handled recursion and iteration as relations between variables which are topologically sorted to determine control flow.

Each function is a toplogical graph of stream functions so it is similar to a data flow language or reactive programming language. The goal is that you should express the critical insight of the algorithm to work out what to write and the code is not nested so there is very little tree structure.

Algebralang is rough notes on how it would appear.

https://github.com/samsquire/algebralang

Example programs in the repository are binary search, btrees, a* algorithm.

I wrote a multithreaded parallel actor interpreter in Java and it uses an invented assembly language which doesn't have a bytecode, it's just text.

I like the ideas behind ani language