Cwal: Scripting Engine Without a Language | Hacker News Reader

Cwal: Scripting Engine Without a Language

fossil.wanderinghorse.net

67 pointsweeber10 comments

Tangent/funny coincidence but seeing the domain wanderinghorse and the name Cwal, I assumed it comes from PL cwał (meaning "full gallop").

(it doesn't and it's pronounced as "see-wall")

for a PL-named PL, how about https://kokogut.sourceforge.net/kogut.html ?

The author should provide their definition of 'language'. I suspect that my definition is much broader.

In my eyes, such a subset of JSON absolutely can be a language in its own right. Indeed, I'd consider the idea of a usable computation model without a language an impossibility.

very interesting project! the docs don't use the phrase "virtual machine"; i wonder if they don't consider it one, and if so, what the distinction is.

Interesting, but the page says the project is in retirement.

I know this spoils the fun but couldn’t u just ask an AI to write your language engine?

Edit: based on my -2 karma, some of you guys don’t sound very open minded.

Buulding a VM is not a beginner task. You can get going if you have some basic understanding of various things, but getting anything half decent tends towards being a research project.

e.g. Scheme, Lua, etc.

AI, as it stands, screws up the basics, let alone something if this scope. It has no formal reasoning. A virtual machine is a formal reasoning engine.

> AI, as it stands, screws up the basics, let alone something if this scope

Do you have examples?

Ask the LLM for examples of LLMs fucking up on simple tasks. Either it succeeds, proving the point, or fails, also proving the point.

I had both GPT-4o and llama3.1, through duck.ai, make up kscreen-doctor commands the other day. Commands that were easily formatted by simply looking at the output of kscreen-doctor --help.

Pretty much everything shown here [0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

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