Crate ashpaper_plus

AshPaper

An inpterpreter for the Esopo language AshPaper conceived by William Hicks. You can read about it and the Esopo project in Willian Hick’s own words here. Daniel Temkin also wrote about it on esoteric.codes, you can read that here. And of course the spec! Checkout that out here.

How it works

You can execute poetry!

Let’s take this poem that calculates factorials and input in the number of syllables in the title. (I (Shea Newton) learned a lot from reading the poem “other woodwork” by William Hicks)

lovely poem

  it is a calculator, like a
      poem, is a poem, and finds
        factori-
          als
  The input is the syllAbles
in the title, count them, as one counts
  (q) what other poem, programs can be writ
  (a) anything a Turing
    machine-machine-machine
    would do
re/cur
    sion works too, in poems, programs, and this
       a lovely.
poem or a calculator or nothing
how lovely can it be?

Using this library, you can run it with a program that looked like this:

use std::fs;

use ashpaper_plus::Program;

pub fn main() {
   let contents = "
lovely poem

 it is a calculator, like a
     poem, is a poem, and finds
       factori-
         als
 The input is the syllAbles
in the title, count them, as one counts
 (q) what other poem, programs can be writ
 (a) anything a Turing
   machine-machine-machine
   would do
re/cur
   sion works too, in poems, programs, and this
      a lovely.
poem or a calculator or nothing
how lovely can it be?
                   ";

    let program = Program::create(&contents);
    print!("{}", program.execute())
}

And it will produce the output:

24

unlike the original, you can also install the binary from this crate (you need to enable the cli feature so the executable is built)

cargo install --features cli ashpaper-plus

Some caveats about compliance with the informal spec

• It’s entirely possible at this point that some of the implementation deviates from the spec in unintended ways. If you spot anything like that, please raise an issue

Structs

Program

Functions

count_syllables