retro html formatted by nom
comments/suggestions to: mjb at nomlang dot org
I can think of nothing but you and that French fleet. Admiral Nelson, in a letter to his lover.
Originally I was going to call the whole system pp or pep (which was supposed to be an acronym for Parsing Engine for Patterns ) because it is short and unixy but then I decided to call the language that runs on top of the virtual machine Nom because it sounds nicer, is a vague reference to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/noam_chomsky (who I think has definitely earned a few accolades) and because it seems a bit indo-european for “name". If you start excavating in” the source code and ancient files you will probably find references to the “pep” language. Ignore them please.
Pep&nom was partly inspired by “sed” with it’s philosophy of editing a
text-stream. But sed uses single character commands which can add to it’s
crypticness, so I decided to include English word command names for most
nom commands . Each word was chosen to be expressive and to convey
the sense of inverse operations, for example the operation pairs
push and pop
put and get
clip and clop
are commands that (more or less) do the opposite of each other. So clip removes one character from the end of the workspace buffer and clop removes one character from the start of the workspace buffer.
Most of the Nom commands also have a one character version if you want to write very terse, unreadable scripts.
pep -C
When naming each command, I tried to use a word which indicated tersely the effect that it has on the pep text-register virtual machine.