marbelous-lang / docs

Documentation, examples, etc.

docs

Documentation, examples, etc.

docs's Issues

Bounded comments

I think it would be neat if one had bounded comments, which could be put somewhere inside the board like a plaque. The simplest thing would be to have # actually toggle comment mode, then you could just embed # some comment # anywhere in a board. Or one could use a separate syntax.

STDOUT device

It would be nice to have [[ in addition to ]]. [[ could print a marble to STDOUT without consuming it. Possible implementation in Marbelous:

:[[
}0
..
{0
}0

Board/program directives

es1024's implementation comes with a few options that seem useful, most notably

• cylindrical boards
• printing integers instead of character codes

We can probably think of a few others...

I'm thinking, it doesn't really make sense for these things to be parameters of the interpreter. They should be tied to the code. A cylindrical board usually won't make sense if marbles are pushed off the edges instead and vice versa. So I'd say these belong into the code, and we can probably add them with directives similar to #include. And while we're at it, I was wondering if we couldn't actually make these per-board directives (and each board defaults to the main board's options).

Lock/Release device pair

An asymmetric version of the synchronisers could be useful. Say we call them Rn and Ln. The Ln hold a marble like a synchroniser and stall. The Rn let all marbles pass through. But if a marble goes through an Rn, all marbles in the corresponding Ln are released.

(This would be a device which cannot be implemented within Marbelous, so would be an actual language addition.)

Half-sided cloners

Should we add |\ and /| as devices which clone the input marble below and to one side? Having the copies at both sides is sometimes a bit unwieldy as it needs 3 columns, and you get a useless column below the cloner.