Pep and Nom

the increment counter "a+" command

Increment the pep accumulator register by one.

This command increments the machine counter variable by one. It is written a+; . The accumulator register can also be decremented (by one) with the a- command. To display the current contents of the accumulator register, use the count command, which appends the value of the counter (as text) to the end of the workspace buffer. If you keep decrementing the counter it will become negative. That's OK.

The tape commands ++ and -- do not affect the accumulator register. They are for incrementing and decrementing the current tape cell.

   # like: grep -c '^[[:space:]]*$' file.txt

   until "\n"; [:space:] { a+; }
   clear;
   (eof) {
     add "* found "; count; add " blank lines in "; lines; 
     add " lines of text.\n"; 
     print; quit;
   }
 

The plus command takes no arguments. Its counter part is the a- command.

notes

The ℙ𝕖𝕡 virtual machine was designed to be as simple as possible while being capable of parsing and transforming context free languages. Also, I wanted, as far as possible to make the ℙ𝕖𝕡 machine completely text-oriented and not capable of performing calculations and other code functions. The reason for this was to avoid embedding compilers and translators in code and thereby hide the language-to-language map features of compilers.

However, it did seem useful to be able to count things, hence the accumulator.