Kirklang is a programming language for, and inspired by, Kirkland House. It is incredibly cursed.
All knowledge in Kirkland lives in Hicks House. There are three kinds of things that exist in Hicks House:
- Books: regular mutable variables. (Everything in Kirklang is globally scoped, because Kirkland is small enough and the group chat active enough that everyone knows what's going on.)
- Shelves: stacks. Writing to these variables pushes to the stack; reading from them pops from it.
- Ghosts: variables with mystical abilities to talk to those beyond the realm of the program. Right now this just means that writing to any ghost writes to standard output and reading from any ghost reads to standard input. If I want to I might add file I/O later, but I probably won't.
You declare a book named x as book x and similarly for shelf and ghost. Hence:
ghost g = "Hello, World!\n";
Books and shelves can store floating-point numbers or strings. They can also store procedures, defined with fun and executed with do:
ghost g;
book f = fun (g = "Hello, World!\n");
do f;
Shelves can store all different types of values at once. Kirklang is not strongly typed, because Kirkland has people of all types.
If we can do good, we must also expect to be able to brew good. Kirklang uses dynamic evaluation, but closures can be created by replacing fun with brew. The following code will print 1.:
ghost g;
book x = 1;
book f = brew (g = x);
x = 2;
do f;
If the brew were a fun, the output would be 2..
Control flow is achieved by two constructs: if and while. In the case of if, 0. is the only truthy value; in the case of while, it is the only falsy one.
Both if and while receive both their conditions and their bodies (including an else case for if) in the form of sub-expressions. For those who want to do more than one thing inside an if statement, the imp command is provided. It takes a sequence of sub-expressions and executes them in order. Hence, fizz buzz:
ghost output;
book n = 25;
book k = 1;
while (sub n k) (
imp
(if (mod k 15) (output = "fizzbuzz") (if (mod k 3) (output = "fizz") (if (mod k 5) (output = "buzz") (output = k))))
(output = "\n")
(k = add k 1)
);
Note the use of sub, add, and mod. Kirklang has no standard library, but it does have implementation-provided intrinsics, all of which come before their arguments. They are currently:
add,mul, andconcat, which add, multiply, or concatenate all their arguments. (You can pass them as many as you'd like.)subanddiv, which are equivalent to OCaml's(-.)and(/.).mod, which is equivalent to(mod)in OCaml except that it first converts its arguments to integers rather than doing float modulo arithmetic.
Kirkland runs on carefully-managed randomness. So does Kirklang. The evaluator takes, not a path to a file, but a path to a folder with possibly dozens of files. (The file extension is .kds.) First, it looks for a generic.kds file. If it finds none, it picks a random file and executes that.
If, however, there is a generic.kds file, the evaluator will first choose a random "week file" from the other .kds files in the folder. Then, any section markers of the form SECTION secname in the generic.kds file will be replaced with the relevant sections from the week file. For example, say that the following is our generic.kds:
ghost out;
out = "It is "
SECTION printweek
out = " week!\n"
Then we can write a number of week files and choose any names we like for them as long as we end them with .kds. Say that we have two. The first is poleweek.kds:
SECTION printweek
out = "pole"
Similarly, we write change.kds:
SECTION printweek
out = "change"
Running the evaluator on the folder with these three files in it will randomly output either It is change week! or It is pole week!.
If you're using Kirklang, you have bigger problems.