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Ask HN: What was that programming language based on creating new grammar rules?

7 points by Miky ↗ HN
A programming language was submitted to HN a while ago. I remember that the only thing you could do was to create grammar rules.

Does anyone remember what this language was? Or, if you created it, could you speak up? :)

6 comments

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Zev
Prolog? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1023192 was recently posted. You create relations between terms with clauses and query them to create programs in Prolog.

Though, I'd be (happily) surprised if Alain Colmerauer read HN.

Miky
No, it wasn't Prolog. It was relatively new and unknown.

It wasn't a logic language; you actually created new syntax for the language, with BNF rules.

mbrubeck
I've seen a few of these recently...

My favorite, OMeta is a pattern/grammar-oriented language (and one of the most interesting papers I read last year). This comes from Alessandro Warth at VPRI, where Alan Kay and others are doing some really great research: http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/

there's the Bondi language and its "pattern calculus": http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3695

and the one that's most like you describe is π (Pi): http://www.pi-programming.org/What.html

Miky
Those sound pretty cool. I'll look into them.