Good Math, Bad Math

Today, I'm going to show you a very simple, very goofy little language called "SCEQL", which standards for "slow and clean esoteric queue language". It's based on nothing but a circular queue of numbers with nothing but 8 commands. It's not one of the more exciting languages, but it can be a lot of fun to figure out how to make the circular queue do what you want it to.

In SCEQL, you've got a circular queue of bytes. You can't *ever* remove anything from the queue. You can alter values on the queue; move things from the front to the back; and add things to it. But that's it.

The commands are:

So, how would we write "Hello world"? Not too hard, actually. We need to know the ascii values of the characters. In bytes in ASCII/UTF-8 encoding, "Hello world" is the sequence of bytes: [72,101,108,108,111,32,87,111,114,108,100,10]. So, we need to have a total of 12 bytes on the queue. It starts with one 0, so we need to add 11. Then we need to generate each of those numbers. !!!!!!!!!!! ________________________________________________________________________= _____________________________________________________________________________________________________= ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________= ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________= _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________= ________________________________= _______________________________________________________________________________________= _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________= __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________= ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________= ____________________________________________________________________________________________________= __________= * * * * * * * * * * * *

Neat, huh? How about something slightly less trivial? Input two numbers and add them together? It's surprisingly hard in SCEQL, because the input and output is all done in bytes. So printing numbers isn't particularly easy. In fact, it's a royal pain. So, of course, the solution is: cheat!. I added two new instructions: "<" to read a number from the input, and ">" to print a number to the output. (You can grab the interpreter extended with those two instructions here. With those extensions, a program to input two integers, add them together, and print them out is: <<=\=_==-/=>

That is, input two numbers, and add them to the end of the queue. Circle past the zero that was the initial value on the queue. If the first of the two numbers isn't zero, then rotate the queue to the second number, increment it, rotate back to the first and decrement it, and branch back to beginning of the loop. After ending the loop, rotate to the second number (the result), and print it out.

Just for kicks, here's a long program in SCECL: "99 bottles of beer".