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The Gerund Programming Language (2014), a Joy-like language for Dictation

In early 2014 I got my Google Glass, and I wanted a way to program it while using it in the natural way: speaking to it, and seeing the results on the heads-up screen.

FORTH-like languages seemed good for this. Dictating special symbols and punctuation is difficult or impossible, but FORTH can be made to work with just words and numbers. And FORTH is known for building programs up from small definitions, which might be small enough to dictate.

This web page will describe the language as it was in 2014 and as it appeared on github ( https://github.com/strickyak/gerund-lang ). It's in rather rough form and could use a little cleanup and maybe some redesign, but I'm not trying to do that now.

Principal Decisions

After a little experimenting, I arrived at two things:

  • In English, gerunds were understood better by the Google Glass than imperatives were. That is, "duping adding popping dropping" were understood better than "dup add pop drop".

  • The language JOY worked out better than FORTH, at least for me in my sample applications, because it can create and manipulate Lists and Lists of Lists with automatic memory allocation and garbage collection.

    Gerund is like Joy in many ways: https://www.google.com/search?q=joy+language+concatenative

    Compound Words

    In practice I often had problems coming up with names for things that I could dictate. I realized that in our ordinary programming languages we frequently compose several things together to create compound words, sometimes with multiple words ("GetVolume", "SetVolume"), sometimes with code letters ("popen", "sprintf"), sometimes numbers ("python3"), sometimes using acronyms ("awk", "grep"), and sometimes just making up words ("foo", "xyzzy").

    I arrived at two mechanisms for making compounds:

  • Ordinal Suffixes: "something the third", "stuff 9th". Internally these are converted to words "something3" and "stuff9".

  • Using "with" between to words: "reducing with adding", "reducing with multiplying", "reducing with concatenating". Internally these are converted to words "reducing_with_adding", etc.

    Ignored Words

    All punctuation is deleted and all letters are converted to lowercase before parsing. Also there is a short list of Stop Words that are just ignored: "the", "a", "an", "number", & "also". Inserting these stop words can make sentences easier to say or more easily understood:

    "the number 60, the minutes multiplying, also the hours adding" means "60 minutes multiplying hours adding".

    REPL

    For my REPL (read-eval-print-loop), I would say things to the Google Glass, and it would evaluate the statement and print the result. The Google Glass recognizes a long pause as being the end of one statement, so terminating marks are not needed.

    There were only two kinds of statements:

  • Commands: For instance, defining a new word to be a sequence of other words.

  • Expressions: A functional evaluation that is free of side-effects.

    Commands

    Commands start with one of these words "define", "list", "definitions", "must" and "test".

    Here is what they do:

  • "Define X words..." -- Define a new word X to be the words that follow it.

  • "list" -- Show all user-defined words (as opposed to those built-in)

  • "list X" -- show the definition of word X

  • "definitions" -- show all user-defined words with their definitions

  • "must N words..." -- evaluate the words... and check that the result equals the number N.

  • "test" -- run unit tests of built-in features.

    Expressions and Images

    Expressions evaluate and are printed as Python lists. (The interpreter is written in Python, so this is convenient.)

    There is one type of result that is special: If the result is a list of lists in which the inner lists contain 9 numbers each, then the result is a picture on a dark background with triangles drawn on it.

    Each inner list describes the three corners of a triangle and a color for the triangle, like this:

    [ X1 Y1 X2 Y2 X3 Y3 R G B ]

    The X,Y coordinates count pixels in the Google Glass's 640 x 360 display, with (0,0) in the lower lefthand corner. The R, G, and B values range 0 to 255.

    Here is an example image created from Gerund:

    Triangles were actually rendered by a server running this Go code: https://github.com/strickyak/triangle-main

    Array Operations

    Arithmetic unary and binary operators can be used with lists as well as with scalars, and the results work as in APL:

    [ 1 2 2 3 2 ] 10 adding              -->   [ 11 12 12 13 12 ]
    
    [ 1 2 3 ] [ 1 10 100 ] multiplying   -->   [ 1 20 300 ]
    
    [ 1 2 2 3 2 ] 2 equaling             -->   [ 0 1 1 0 1 ]
    

    You can see that 0 means false and 1 means true. In that example we printed lists in brackets "[" and "]", but in spoken Gerund they would be replaced by the words "opening" and "closing".

    Prime Numbers

    12 is not prime: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=12+priming

    13 is prime: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=13+priming

    The numbers from 1 to 100: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=100+counting

    The primes from 1 to 100: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=100+counting+opening+priming+closing+filtering

    How "priming" was defined:

    duplicating counting opening getting2 swapping modulo 0 equaling closing mapping summing 2 equaling swapping popping
    

    duplicating ( X -- X X ) duplicates the top of stack.

    counting ( N -- [1 2 3... N] ) returns a list of numbers 1 to N

    opening & closing create a list quoting everything between opening & closing

    getting2 ( X Y -- X Y X ) gets the second thing on the stack

    swapping ( X Y -- Y X ) swaps the top two things

    modulo ( X Y -- M ) returns X modulo Y as M.

    equaling ( X Y -- B ) compares X and Y and returns True or False as B.

    mapping ( L F -- R ) applies the quoted list F (like a function) to each element of the list L and returns a list of the results R.

    summing ( L -- S ) returns the sum S of the elements in the list L.

    popping ( X -- ) pops the top of stack and throws it away.

    filtering ( L F -- R ) applies the quoted list F to each element of the list L and returns the elements of L for which the function is true.

    Web Demo

    http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=pyramid5

    How it works: Alice the Pyramid

    http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=alice

    How that worked:

    alice9 emits a list of 1 triangle, a seed for the entire construction.

    Specifically, alice9 results in this list:

    [[0.0, 0.0, 300.0, 300.0, 600.0, 0.0, 44.0, 44.0, 222.0]]
    
    That is, the three corners of the triangle are (0,0) (300,300) and (600,0), and the red is 44, green is 44, and blue is 222 (out of 255).

    So it is this blue triangle: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=alice9

    alice8 emits a list of affine functions, which are 6-tuples of: [ mxx mxy myx myy ax ay ] which are 4 matrix elements of M for multiplying times an input point and 2 matrix elements of A for adding to the result.

    Specifically, alice8 results in this list:

    [[0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0], [0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 200.0], [0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 300.0, 0.0]]
    

    So you can see that here: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=alice8

    alice6 is the function to compute the next generation. It's inputs on the stack are a list of input triangles and a list of affine functions. It transforms all input triangles with all functions and produces a new list of triangles (which will be green, regardless of the color of the input triangles).

    So if you feed it the seed triangle with "alice9" and the list of affines from "alice8" you will get the next generation which has 3 triangles:

    http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=alice9+alice8+alice6

    and you can iterate pushing the affines and computing another generation:

    http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=alice9+alice8+alice6+alice8+alice6

    http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=alice9+alice8+alice6+alice8+alice6+alice8+alice6

    More parts of Alice:

    alice1 X Y F -> X

    takes an X and Y value of a point, and an affine function F, and returns the new X value.

    alice2 X Y F -> Y

    takes an X and Y value of a point, and an affine function F, and returns the new Y value.

    alice3 X Y F -> X Y

    takes an X and Y value of a point, and an affine function F, and returns the new X and new Y value.

    alice4 T F --> T

    takes a triangle T and an affine function F and produces a new triangle, colored green, where each new triangle point is the original triangle point with the affine function applied.

    Demo: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=opening%20%20opening%201%202%2030%2040%2099%209%20closing%20listing%20%20%20opening%20half%200%200%20half%20200%20100%20closing%20listing%20%20%20alice4%20closing%20listing

    alice5 T FF --> TT

    takes a triangle T and a list of affine functions FF and returns a list of triangles TT that result from applying all the functions to that input triangle.

    alice6 TT FF --> TT

    takes a list of triangles TT and a list of affine functions FF and returns a list of triangles TT, as described above.

    Viewing Definitions

    To see one definition, use "list" and the word: http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=list+alice4

    To see all definitions, use "definitions": http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=definitions

    To see just the user-defined words, use "list": http://node1.yak.net:7518/?text=list

    To find out what the built-in functions are and what they do, read the source! https://github.com/strickyak/gerund-lang/blob/master/gerund.py

    Triangle Server

    Is the triangle server up? Let's see:

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