Hey Wim,

Thank you so much for the ideas, I've made lots of changes based on your
suggestions, here's some of these changes, I hope it makes it easier for 
students to grasp.

---

After the first example it might be good to add an example of the stack
annotation:

 > #01 DUP ADD #03 MUL      program
   -------------------
 >  01  01  02  02  06      stack

Hey Felix,

Thanks for the all excellent ideas, I've tried to add correction to each 
one, here's some of the changes I've made:

---

The very first line of the very first example already uses the relative 
padding and structure definition idiom - I wonder whether it would be 
easier to keep
the first example simpler by using plain "#" literals instead.

 > I've had feedback about the examples pulling both direction, some 
have said the example is too simple, others that it is too easy, so I've

Since some of the emails bounce because they include HTML, I'll repost 
them. This one is from Snufkin:

--------------

Thank you very much for improving the documentation!

Suggestions:
1. I think that all the example snippets should be self contained, for 
example the fib example should be something that can be cut and pasted 
as a unity:

#0007 fib ( 000d )

Hi!

Felix has mentioned that the current docs are not complete or exhaustive 
enough, and I'd like to improve that.

GOAL: A structured description of each language feature.

Right now, the docs is this page(and sub pages):

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxntal

It's already pretty long and does not include the opcode reference, 
which is on its own page. The way I structured it was to work from the 
Hello World example at the top, followed by a table of all the runes

I didn't write a specification for macros, only implemented a sketch so 
someone(hey Alex!) could try it out, as it is something they thought 
they needed for their project. But in the end, I wasn't super happy with 
the complexity it added to the assembler, and ultimately, after a bit of 
code review, macros were not the right tool to do what the person asking 
for macro variables wanted to do.

It's less about making uxntal powerful, and more about helping folks who 
write software in it find a way to do what they want to do, in a fun way.

What would a formal or semi-formal specification look like? I've looked 
up language specs and what turns up is all pretty complicated 
academic-looking things that there is no way in hell I would be able to 
write.

The idea is that when a macro name doesn't include a star, there's no 
matching happening, but the macro definition order becomes very 
important, and after spending a whole day playing with this, I'm 
starting to worry that this might lead to more errors than it solves.

I got tripped by macros overwriting others defined later, it will "fail" 
quietly, if a macro name is made of of another macro with a wildcard. I 
can raise a warning when defining a macro that would automatically be 
ignored from being caught by another macro, but even the barest 
implementation of this system, is teetering on implementation complexity 
beyond what I was hoping from at the start.

The uxnrepl has an implementation of the system that works, so you can 
poke at it and see what it feels like for these various cases. It might

Hey everyone!

A topic that has been coming up a lot lately is how to pass a variable 
through a macro. After a bit of chatting with folks interested, we've 
come up with something that affords just enough to pass a single 
variable, and allow for representing literal immediate runes internally 
entirely in macros.

The idea is to allow something like a wildcard in macro names:

%add2-to-* { #0002 ;* ADD2 }

Would match any keyword that begins with "add-", and allow to inject 
that name anywhere in the macro where "*" is found, so:

After a few more hours puzzling on this, I found a fewer rules that can 
resolve to fac(5), in 10 rules, if I keep the boundary as a rule, it's 
even smaller, I've tried to start off from a more standard input like: 
fib n^5, but I haven't been able to cut it down shorter than 11 rules yet.

:: mul n^5 >
:: mul z i > mul x i
:: mul   i > mul
:: mul x y > mul y z res
:: mul   y > mul i n
:: mul x   > mul
:: mul     > fac
:: fac res > fac x
:: fac n   > fac y

I was trying to find an implementation of factorial in Fractran and I 
couldn't find one, so I went ahead and implemented it. I feel like it 
might be possible to optimize it further, but I'm running out of ideas.

429/1001, 13/143, 910/195, 143/65, 13/39, 437/221, 57/38, 665/437, 
29/19, 667/203, 13/29, 4485/527

Recipe:

:: mul z i > mul x i
:: mul   i > mul
:: mul x y > mul y z res
:: mul   y > mul i
:: mul x   > mul

Looking forward to reading the article! With a title like "Collapse OS, 
may be our only salvation" I can already imagine the eye-rolls. I hope 
the rest of the article is not too preachy, haha.

The timing is good, Americans(and those who rely on tech centralized in 
America) are beginning to taste the ending of an age.

Dll

On 2025-03-24 06:37, Rett Berg wrote:
> Looks like it's coming March 26 and is titled "The best programming
> language for the end of the world" -- "Once the grid goes down an old
> programming language called Forth -- and a new operating system called
> Collapse OS -- may be our only salvation"