
Show HN: Blank – A stack-based programming language I wrote 21 years ago - aturley
https://esolangs.org/wiki/Blank
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aturley
I wrote Blank back in the spring of 1997 when I was a senior in high school. I
had gotten kind of into a programming language called Befunge
([https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge](https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge)), and
I decided to write my own weird programming language. I'll admit that it was
_highly_ derivative of Befunge, but I threw in my own little twists. For
example, Befunge programs were written and executed in a fixed 2 dimentional
grid, while my language was 1 dimensional and you could add and remove
segments from the program. It was the first C program of any size that I had
ever written.

Blank lacks the inspired audacity of languages like Brainfuck and Whitespace.
It has almost none of the playfulness of Befunge. Missing, too, is the
outright user-hostily of INTERCAL. It was bad, but so mediocre in its badness
that it wasn't really worth remembering for most people. But it was mine.

I had never taken a programming class and I'd never really had any sort of
adult who could help me much with programming at that time, so this was
basically something that I did through sheer stupid stubbornness. The folks on
the Befunge mailing list were nice to me and were very polite in the face of
my teenage ignorance and over-confidence. In retrospect I probably could have
spent the time doing something better, but one of the wonderful things about
being young is that you can waste some time exploring.

~~~
pryelluw
I aplogize if it's mentioned in the wiki, but do you still have the source
code?

~~~
aturley
Sadly no, lost to the dusts of time.

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Lerc
Thanks for posting this. I was looking at adding some form of simple flow
control to my stack based texture maker.
[http://fingswotidun.com/stackie](http://fingswotidun.com/stackie)

This gives me a good insight into how to go.

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eafkuor
Oh, me too! I wrote this 8 years ago:
[https://esolangs.org/wiki/BAM128](https://esolangs.org/wiki/BAM128)

Although it's much less impressive than Blank :)

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gkya
Not nearly as interesting, but I've written a silly version of brainfuck in
the past where you used the command line arguments to write your program:
[https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/bin/optf...](https://github.com/cadadr/configuration/blob/master/bin/optfuck.c)

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smoyer
It looks pretty cool ... I tried to follow the link to the homepage (for the
documentation) but it appears to be gone.

