Beatnik

This is Cat's Eye Technologies' distribution of tools for Cliff L. Biffle's Beatnik programming language. This includes an interpreter for Beatnik, some example Beatnik programs, a compiler from a wimpmode dialect called Wottasquare, and various small utilities which can (for example) search a dictionary file for all words with a given Scrabble score.

All tools are written in Python and located in the scripts directory. You may wish to cd to this directory to run them, or put this directory on your executable search path.

beatnik.py

Basic usage:

beatnik.py (filename.beatnik|--eval 'Beatnik program source')

Interprets the Beatnik program in the given source file, or, if the --eval flag is given, the Beatnik program in the command line.

It considers the program to be written in Beatnik at face value. That is to say, it interprets the Beatnik specification as containing no errors, even though the author claims there is an error in it and won't divulge where. Don't expect this interpreter to work on the example programs supplied with the specification.

This interpreter seems to have the same behaviour as Catatonic Porpoise's Beatnik interpreter. This repository could stand to contain some test cases, though.

beatnik.py also takes a --debug flag, which dumps some internal state to standard error as the program is run.

beatnik.py also takes a --tokenize flag, which prevents the program from being run, and instead dumps a representation of the program in Wottasquare to standard output. (It is essentially a Beatnik-to-Wottasquare compiler.)

The following idiom can be used to find out what Scrabble score, and thus what Beatnik instruction, a particular word has.

$ beatnik.py --tokenize --eval 'Twenty'
[12:DUP/Twenty]

wottasquare.py

Basic usage:

wottasquare.py [--dictionary filename] filename.wottasquare

Reads the Wottasquare program from the given file and compiles it to an equivalent Beatnik program on standard output.

The Wottasquare language has the same semantics as the Beatnik language, but each token has the form [n:comment] where n is the Scrabble score, given in decimal, and comment is optional, purely descriptive, and ignored by translation tools such as this one.

Thus, the Wottasquare token [5] could be translated to any word which has a Scrabble score of 5, such as slug, for use in Beatnik.

By default, wottasquare.py looks in /usr/share/dict/words for words to use when translating Wottasquare to Beatnik. A different dictionary file can be specified with the --dictionary command-line argument. Note that the dictionary file is parsed like a Beatnik source file would be; punctuation is ignored (and treated as word seperator), etc.

There are two flags which trigger special behaviour:

wottasquare.py --find 'number-or-word'

Shows the Scrabble score of the given word (or treats the given argument as a Scrabble score, if it is numeric,) then dumps, to standard output, 20 words chosen from the dictionary file which have the same Scrabble score as the given word. Examples:

$ wottasquare.py --find chase
10
cubits badger gourmet pointers militant acumen engorges rehab fulled bibles bonny wantons motored blasters colossus warder howl colonial mainline frailer

$ wottasquare.py --find 5
5
nip rode sitar lisle stilt uteri slug stain stool earls terns cot liter stout lob lab trots lotus altos boo

The flag --find-all works similarly, but dumps all words from the dictionary with the given Scrabble score to standard output.

make-wottasquare-print.py

Takes a string on the command line and writes, to standard output, a Wottasquare program which, when run, prints that string. It does not produce the most efficient such program.

This tool was used to generate eg/hello-world.wottasquare, which was then translated to Beatnik by wottasquare.py, which was then manually formatted and punctuated, with some (maybe 3%) words "adjusted" to make it flow better.

License

The contents of this repository are in the public domain. See the file UNLICENSE in this directory for more information.