Squishky2K

This is the reference distribution for the esoteric programming language Squishy2K.

Here is a copy of the email that announced its creation. That's all the docs you get for now.

.....Subject: [Esoteric] [Languages] New! Squishy2K (v2000.10.06)
        Date: Fri, 06 Oct 2000 20:56:43 -0500
        From: Chris Pressey
Organization: Cat's Eye Technologies
          To: Cat's Eye Technologies Mailing List


Back in ancient history I came up with a language which worked like a
Turing-Complete EBNF - a compiler-compiler that could also do banal
computation via translation.  I wanted to call the language Wirth in
honour of the inventor of EBNF.  But the name SQUISHY was proposed and
stuck.

SQUISHY is now left to the sands of time, and this was long before I had
ever heard of a semi-Thue grammar or the language Thue.

But SQUISHY is now back, refurbished for the twenty-first century, in
the form of Squishy2K!  Squishy2K is a lot like the original SQUISHY
except with more and less.  It's not as much like EBNF anymore.  On the
other hand, it's more like a state machine now!  And in Perl it's dead
simple, something like 7K of code.

Squishy2K is a string-rewriting language (read: Thue) embedded within a
state machine (read: beta-Juliet) with states-doubling-as-functions
thrown in for good measure (read: I haven't rhe foggiest idea what I'm
doing.)

Reading the grammar will prove to you how simple it is.

  Program ::= {State}.
  State   ::= "*" Name "{" {Rule} ["!" Name] "}".
  Rule    ::= LString "?" RString "!" [Name].
  LString ::= {quoted | "few" | "many" | "start" | "finish"}.
  RString ::= {quoted | digit | Name "(" RString ")"}.

In English... a program consists of any number of states.  Each state
begins with an asterisk, gives a name (alphanumeric), and contains any
number of rules and an optional notwithstanding clause between curly
braces.  The state named "main" is where flow control begins and ends.

Each rule is composed of an "lstring" (a pattern to be searched for) and
an "rstring" (an expression to replace any matched pattern with.)  The
pattern tokens "start" and "finish" match the beginning and the end of
the input string respectively.  The tokens "few" and "many" match any
number of characters, the former preferring to match as few as possible,
the latter is "greedy."  In the rstring, backreferences to the few and
many tokens may be made with digits: 1 indicates the first few or many,
2 the second, and so on.

Each rule, and the notwithstanding clause, can name another state, and
when a match succeeds on that rule (or no match succeeds for the
notwithstanding clause), a transition along the arc to that state fires
(i.e. it's a goto...)

That's about it.

Now I have to write a fake infomercial for it, and it'll be complete. 
:-)

_chris

-- 
Uryc! V'z genccrq vafvqr gur ebg13 plcure!
Share and Enjoy on Cat's Eye Technologies' Electronic Mailing List
http://www.catseye.mb.ca/list.html