retro html formatted by nom
comments/suggestions to: mjb at nomlang dot org
<quote>
I think that it is useful to step back from a project or an
activity and just “give it time” . The subconscience works away and
new ideas pop up without being beckoned. I haven't done any work on
pep&nom for a few months but from time to time, things occur to me.
One of these things relates to how important the C language continues
to be for software that needs to run anywhere including microcontrollers.
This is despite C's many drawbacks, it’s hall of horrors. The pep
tool is written in C and scripts can (or could) be compiled to
“standalone” C with the translation script /tr/translate.c.pss .
At one point this translation script was working satisfactorily,
or at least to my satisfaction, but there a little water under the
bridge now, and I need to bring this script up to date. It needs to
be rewritten using the grammar and excellent improvements that can be
seen in translation scripts such as /tr/nom.toperl.pss and /tr/nom.tolua.pss
and I don’t think that I can use an LLM or an agent or claude or
openclaw or anything similar in this case. This is the disadvantage of
working in a language that you invented and which nobody appears to be
enamoured of, apart from yourself.
Another idea that came to me, is that I really don’t want to do memory management in the C translation of nom scripts. Or to be more precise: I don’t want to use malloc or realloc at all. Is this a form of masochism or self-torture? No, it is just a way for the translated nom scripts to run on microcontrollers. So I do have to do memory management for the tape array because the strings on the tape grow and grow and grow, and they are supposed to. But that grow in fairly predictable ways, in that the “low” cells of the tape get bigger and bigger and the “high” cells cease to be relevant.
This predictability encourages me to think that I can hand-code some memory management for the tape array by swapping and juggling and coallescing pointers to string buffers.
If I can fix the problem with the spacebar on this old Asus laptop
which is running MX linux quite happily, then all will become
fruitful and straightforward...