The Creeper is Polish

Started by thepenguin, December 18, 2012, 06:22:19 PM

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thepenguin

At least we know now, seeing as its using RPN...

By the way, are there any advantages to Reverse Polish Notation, as opposed to the way that every normal language (except for HP (C) engineering calculators) uses?
We have become the creeper...

knucracker

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-oriented_programming_language
Scroll down to "analysis of the language model".

There are really few advantages in this model for contemporary languages.  They are throw backs to simple machines that had limited resources (Like and HP calculator).  Note, though, that the Java VM is a stack based architecture internally.... so that makes you think about when these things are appropriate in a more modern setting.

For game 3, the advantages are that I can do everything very quickly and that it will also execute very quickly.  Once upon a time I wrote and graph based language for use in a business product and it took me 6 months to get right.  This whole CRPL system was a pipe dream just over a week ago, but I've gotten most of a complete system working already.  Plus, it's very fast at run time as well.

The trade off is complexity for the developer.  It is nowhere near as nice as a high level modern language.  On the other hand, all of those nice features you get in a modern language come with their own complexities.  At the end of the day, the idea is just to allow basic scripting within a model that is more extensible than just just CW2 based field commands.