The Shakespeare programming language

Nice! One of the authors (Jon Åslund) is a colleague of mine at Spotify. He did a talk at europython about our python usage: http://ep2011.europython.eu/conference/talks/spotify-and-pyt...

The Wikipedia page doesn't really explain how the language works. The manual is a much better source: http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/

I implemented a shakespeare interpreter a couple of years ago and it was great fun, although I had to extend the language a bit to be able to write tests. Sadly, there was an ISO commitee where I could send requests to get new standard features :)

The Esolang wiki has articles on a number of other "Thematic" languages in this flavor: http://esolangs.org/wiki/Category:Thematic

what would be super interesting is an obfuscater that sort of did the opposite of this. Feeding it normal source would output a Shakespearian play that could be decoded and run on another computer.

I've actually written a snippet in this once as a personal challenge. The GOTOs don't work properly in the interpreter I used, which just messed everything up.

This has been around for quite a while, and, as usual, the "99 Bottles of Beer" example is quite instructive as to how to use the language on a real problem. "Thou art as cute as the difference between yourself and the sum of a furry cat and an animal. Speak your mind." :)

http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-shakespeare-664.html