Cwal: Scripting Engine Without a Language

(fossil.wanderinghorse.net)

65 points | by weeber 2 days ago ago

10 comments

  • rpastuszak 2 days ago

    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")

  • johnecheck 2 days ago

    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.

  • zem a day ago

    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.

  • mcphage 2 days ago

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

  • pipeline_peak 2 days ago

    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.

    • shakna a day ago

      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.

      • pipeline_peak a day ago

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

        Do you have examples?

        • Novosell a day ago

          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.

        • shakna a day ago

          Pretty much everything shown here [0]

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