PATH and 10 Print Interpretation

<blockquote>Jeremy: [W]hile the output of Nick's one-liner *visually* specifies a kind of open maze, it was not immediately intuitive to me that the information contained in the character array contains a maze. I initially imagined that data to specify a maze should requiring empty hall and full wall (low bit/high bit) which is a very different thing from this wall of slashes that might as well be ps and qs. Such an encoding strategy can't be generated with any coherency by a random function -- if you use *s and spaces with such a simple algorith, you just get static. When I thought about it, however, I realized that the twisting passages visually implied by the slashes only require a very few rules to be specified / made executable. These rules are already implemented in the esoteric language Path -- just add a $ start-point to a random location in the output, and the Path programming language will happily execute a path that navigates through the structure of / and \ characters much as we would visually or physically, ending either trapped in a loop or falling off the edge of the space. '''This moment where the output of one programming language becomes (even unintentionally) a new program in another language is also something I'd love to explore in the book.'''</blockquote>

<blockquote>Jeremy: [W]hile the output of Nick's one-liner *visually* specifies a kind of open maze, it was not immediately intuitive to me that the information contained in the character array contains a maze. I initially imagined that data to specify a maze should requiring empty hall and full wall (low bit/high bit) which is a very different thing from this wall of slashes that might as well be ps and qs. Such an encoding strategy can't be generated with any coherency by a random function -- if you use *s and spaces with such a simple algorith, you just get static. When I thought about it, however, I realized that the twisting passages visually implied by the slashes only require a very few rules to be specified / made executable. These rules are already implemented in the esoteric language Path -- just add a $ start-point to a random location in the output, and the Path programming language will happily execute a path that navigates through the structure of / and \ characters much as we would visually or physically, ending either trapped in a loop or falling off the edge of the space. '''This moment where the output of one programming language becomes (even unintentionally) a new program in another language is also something I'd love to explore in the book.'''</blockquote>

== PATH ==

== PATH ==

PATH is conceptually like Befunge with the code being a 2D grid of characters in which execution happens in Cartesian directions. It actually has direction operators (< > ^ v) somewhat like Befunge (only conditional), but it also specifies slashes as visually intuitive reflectors (somewhat like Nick's PETSCII symbols). While Nick's program output would need to output ASCII \ / rather than PETSCII graphical characters, that and the addition of a $ would make any output execute in PATH (although it wouldn't compute anything in memory other than perform the act of tracing an execution path). I've given a few presentations that included PATH -- I'm attaching a picture that illustrates the execution order of their title-logo-program so you can see the reflectors working.

PATH is conceptually like Befunge with the code being a 2D grid of characters in which execution happens in Cartesian directions. It actually has direction operators (< > ^ v) somewhat like Befunge (only conditional), but it also specifies slashes as visually intuitive reflectors (somewhat like Nick's PETSCII symbols). While Nick's program output would need to output ASCII \ / rather than PETSCII graphical characters, that and the addition of a $ would make any output execute in PATH (although it wouldn't compute anything in memory other than perform the act of tracing an execution path). I've given a few presentations that included PATH -- I'm attaching a picture that illustrates the execution order of their title-logo-program so you can see the reflectors working.

=== PATH language ref summary ===

=== PATH language ref summary ===