Recto – A Truly 2D Language
>Virtually all the languages we humans use—spoken, written, or artificial (such as programming languages)—are fundamentally one-dimensional.
Anyone having a look at a musical score can conclude this is wrong.
Even when it comes to spoken language, intonation is conveying a lot, even in languages which are not classified as tonal.
All that said, that's nice to see an exploration of exotic expression form. It doesn't need to down other approach to make shine its own.
I love this concept but I feel it is hamstrung by the need to write it using a text editor. If the rectangles were defined by actual graphical shapes it would be a lot easier to read and understand.
Also I wonder if positional parameters would need to be replaced by named arguments.
I consider Unreal Blueprints to be essentially a 2D language with the data flow and the execution flow modelled in separate dimensions.
Having only the corners marked out with weird markers makes it hard to visualize the rectangles. It would be nicer to have the entire rectangle laid out of Unicode box drawing characters.
I'm guessing the author doesn't speak Spanish. :)
Has this paradigm been explored as a basis for visual programming languages? It seems like it could do a better job of handling the “density” of a program, which is often a problem in VPLs.
There is a whole category of multiple dimension languages on esolang [1]... Nothing you'd really want to use other than to impress someone.
No languages captures time as a dimension, yet.
[1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Esolang:Categorization#Dimensions
Hexagony is another 2d language: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Hexagony
There is also thje 2D dialect of Racket: https://docs.racket-lang.org/2d/
Isn't this just braces/parens with extra steps?
I think this is only makes sense if you have new hardware visuals like either VR or AR. It doesn’t make sense on a pancake screen
Does Recto support something like this:
Why the tight limit of only 2 dimensions? Seems unnecessary. A more general approach would be to support an arbitrary amount of dimensions
"Straight" in Spanish. Perfect name for 2D and vectors.
Truly interesting read! @mhagiwara The article reads very well.
With the bandwidth left from parsing all that new information, all I can say is this is something. I know there's still a whole lot of figuring out to do.
(I imagine if there were peeps from other-than-earth, they'd probably communicate in a manner as this - depicted in the "Arrival" movie)
Thanks for sharing. I'll be donating a star on github and keeping watch-O
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I really enjoyed this read! Sending you support, strength and comfort to you for the days ahead
The author and his family are in the middle of a harrowing battle with cancer. Here are links to his go fund me and caringbridge: https://gofund.me/19bb7ee3 https://www.caringbridge.org/site/b0895f78-5320-39d6-96ad-8b...