A combined interpreter and compiler for the Half-Broken Car in Heavy Traffic programming language
Project description
Half-Broken Car in Heavy Traffic is a difficult programming language with only 5 combined operators and direction “signs” for 2D grids.
hbcht is a Python 3.1+ combined compiler/interpreter for the language.
License
mege is free software under the terms of the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License (WTFPL); see the file COPYING.txt. The author of mege is Niels G. W. Serup, contactable at ngws@metanohi.name.
Contact
The author of hbcht is Niels G. W. Serup. Bug reports and suggestions should be sent to ngws@metanohi.name for the time being.
Installation
Way #1
Get the newest version of hbcht at http://metanohi.name/projects/hbcht/ or at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/hbcht
Extract hbcht from the downloaded file, cd into it and run this in a terminal:
# python3 setup.py install
Examples are available in the examples directory.
Way #2
Just run something like this:
# pip-3 install hbcht
Note that this will not make any examples available.
Language documentation
This is the official documentation of HBCHT.
HBCHT is a 2D grid-based programming language. You are a car fighting to get to the exit of a very chaotic highway. You have to follow the signs, but whenever you do that, you also change your memory. The value of your current memory cell can be incremented or decremented and your memory cell index can change. You can also find signs that tell you to turn either right or not turn at all, depending on your memory.
The car can drive in four directions: up, right, down, and left. Because of the chaos, you never know which direction the car is headed when the program starts. This makes it easy to randomize the output.
To make things worse (actually, it’s to make programming in HBCHT possible), you cannot turn left because your car is half-broken. You can drive straight ahead, you can turn right, and you can reverse.
Markers
o car # exit, return/print
Operations
> go right, next memory cell < go left, previous memory cell ^ go up, increment v go down, decrement / go right if the current memory cell has the same value as the previous memory cell, else continue (if the previous memory cell does not exist, its value is zero)
Rules
There can be only one car and only one exit
The car cannot turn left; any relative left turns will be ignored along with their memory effects
The program always starts at memory cell #0
All memory cells have the value 0 by default
Input values cannot be negative, but values returned by a program can
The car cannot go out of bound; if it exits to the right, it reenters to the left, etc.
Values cannot be input to memory cells below memory cell #0, but the program can set values in these
Values can be arbitrarily large. An interpreter or compiler without this feature is valid, but not perfect (note that hbcht’s C translator uses 32-bit ints and is thereby not perfect).
A semicolon denotes a comment. Anything from the semicolon to the end of the line is ignored.
If a program file contains a line that starts with @intext, it will see input as text and convert the text to ordinals before running the core function.
If a program file contains a line that starts with @outtext, it will show output as a text string instead of a list of numbers.
Use
As a command-line tool
Run hbcht to use it. Run hbcht --help to see how to use it.
As a module
To find out how to use it, run:
$ pydoc3 hbcht
Examples
There are a few examples in the examples directory.
Development
hbcht uses Git for code management. The newest (and sometimes unstable) code is available at:
$ git clone git://gitorious.org/hbcht/hbcht.git
