ℙ𝕖𝕡 🙴 ℕ𝕠𝕞

The cleverman spoke precisely, humanity he said was done It’s creed of greed could not proceed if our struggle’s to be won. Kev Carmody

second generation translation in nom

It is a strange-ish fact that any nom script that translates nom scripts into another format or language can be run on itself.

What is more, this has a practical purpose: to create a ℙ𝕖𝕡 🙵 ℕ𝕠𝕞 engine in the target language. This facility is similar to the idea of a compiler being 'self-hosted' but it works for every nom translation script in the /tr/ folder (at least the ones that have been properly debugged - feel free to lend a hand). Nom also has a self-hosting compiler called bumble.sf.net/books/pars/compile.pss which is (obviously) a nom script.

I cannot think of any domain specific language which is capable of doing this.

 pep -f tr/translate.ruby.pss tr/translate.ruby.pss > machine.rb

 echo 'r;t;t;d;' | ruby machine.rb > test.rb

The line above produces a ruby script called test.rb which does the same thing that the nom script 'r;t;t;d;' does (print every character in the input stream twice).

There are even more bizarre and amazing implications of the idea of a “translator translating the translator in order to create a ” translator". For example, the generational translation can be repeated as many times as desired and into any language for which a translator exists.

Even more bizarre is the fact that in languages like perl which are capable of executing a string as code, then we can use the translated translator as an interpreter (after adding a small addition method which executed the compiled script as a string and adding a command line switch to read the input script file.)

The perl translator is currently not finished (2025) so I can't completely demonstrate this but I have achieved it successfully with simple scripts.

The bash function pep.tt which is in the helper file bumble.sf.net/books/pars/helpers.pars.sh actually tests each translator with second generation scripts. That is to say that it translates the translator and then checks that new translator compiles an executes all the one-line scripts correctly.

This is a big topic and I will come back to this document to expand and explain the ramifications of all this, with specific examples for different translation scripts.

To be continued.