SMETANA

Chris Pressey, 1994(ish)

A long time ago (about six years ago), I was writing some amusing notes to myself and among them was an "algorithm that'll never fly," which went something like:

1. Swap steps one and two.
2. Flap wings.
3. Go back to step one.

It then occurred to me that reducing this form to the absurd (removing the "Flap wings" instruction) just might fail to yield a totally untractable language.

I originally wrote the interpreter as a Visual Basic application and named it SMETANA - both an acronym for "Self-Modifying, Extremely Tiny AutomatoN Application", and a reference to the composer of the same name.

The distribution available here is a much better implementation of the SMETANA interpreter in a much more device-independent and scalable form. I have retained the English syntax exactly. The program ends when it tries to peform step number n, where n is one plus the number of steps given in the source.

Syntax of the SMETANA Language:

Smetana ::= Step {".\n" Step} ".".
Step    ::= "Step" Integer "." (GoTo | Swap).
GoTo    ::= "Go" "to" "step" Integer.
Swap    ::= "Swap" "step" Integer "with" "step" Integer.
Integer ::= "0".."9" {"0".."9"}.