The Thue Programming Language

This is Cat's Eye Technologies' distribution of Thue, an esoteric programming language designed by John Colagioia. Thue is a non-deterministic string-rewriting language, based on a formalism called a semi-Thue system, but also including some programming-oriented features, like input and output.

The specification can be found in the file thue.txt in the doc directory.

John's implementation of the language, in C, is in the file thue.c in the src directory, and can, for all intents and purposes, be considered the reference implementation. There is no Makefile but an executable can be built by running the included build.sh script, which is trivial.

In the src directory, there are also two other implementation of Thue:

• thue.py, in Python, written by Frédéric van der Plancke
• thue.rb, in Ruby, written by Chris Pressey

There is an assortment of example Thue programs in the eg directory. The credits for these are as follows:

• add_bin.t: Frédéric van der Plancke
• edgcase?.t: Chris Pressey
• truth-machine.t: Keymaker
• quine.t: TSUYUSATO Kitsune
• all others: John Colagioia

More information on Thue can be found on the esolangs.org wiki entry for Thue.

Contents in this distribution are "essentially in the public domain" (scare quotes intentional.) See the file LICENSE for more information.