> If you're gonna make a website for your programming language, you NEED to put an example of the language front and center on the landing page.
Did you consider the possibility that this sort of thing was done to avoid wasting time with non-experts who think an "example" of a language they don't know is enough to make comments about?
> I still have not seen a line of TAL
My suggestion: Start with the "Papers" and then look at the paper that introduces TAL. It has an example program with analysis
I think a challenge to me for typing assembly, unless you’re doing old-school C style minimally-useful types, is that assembly types tend to be both more ad hoc and more transient than types in higher level languages, because these types come from the intersection of the problem domain and the way of expressing the solution, instead of just from the problem domain. In C++ I might have a type for “aircraft velocity in mm/s”, but in assembly I might have that type on one line, and then go to velocity in 2x mm/s the next line to save a renormalization; or have types for various state flags, but have them pack differently into a word in different places in the code. This is all expressible, but I think it would make me favor a more implicit typing with a heavier emphasis on deduction, just to minimize the description of types that exist but are not in themselves interesting.
Just thinking about an aircraft's velocity as a specific type, rather than a vector with three floats, has my mind whirling. I can imagine a lot of terrifying things I wish I didn't think could be added later to that struct in some avionics system. What would you need a type for that for? Am I thinking too high level, where this type might include its own getters and function calls?
Feel like this could be the solution to “LLMs will write in binary” Elon was talking about. The problem with it is, assembly is tightly coupled to the hardware, so LLMs might have an easier time generating/understanding context of a “typed” assembly language but now need to understand the hardware and its constraints as part of the context or have it in its training data. I personally just think having that knowledge codified deterministically in the compiler is simpler, but I guess time will tell.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 32.2 ms ] threadThree links deep and I finally found some code... packaged in a gz archive. I still have not seen a line of TAL
This was obviously someone's research project, and some of the papers have example code in them, e.g. see https://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/papers/talx86-wcsss.pdf.
Did you consider the possibility that this sort of thing was done to avoid wasting time with non-experts who think an "example" of a language they don't know is enough to make comments about?
> I still have not seen a line of TAL
My suggestion: Start with the "Papers" and then look at the paper that introduces TAL. It has an example program with analysis
Too bad there's no examples of how this looked like.