
The Frink programming language - fogus
http://futureboy.us/frinkdocs/
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stan_rogers
I've looked at the doco, but I can't seem to find a way to declare a new
glaven, even in jest. That should be a central feature in a language named
Frink, shouldn't it?

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monkey
If a glaven is a new type of unit not related to any of the ordinary metric
units, you can add it thusly:

glaven =!= awesomeness

Which makes it the fundamental unit of awesomeness. Then you can write things
like

100 kiloglaven / second

to express the rate of increase of your awesomeness.

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Jun8
I looked at the examples and they look awesome. One thing I didn't get,
though: How will you keep in mind the various units etc? For example, it's
great that Frink has the "beerbarrel" unit, but how would you know of this a
priori if you have not used it before. There must be powerful search and/or
completion mechanisms in the IDE to be able to use this effectively it seems.

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simcop2387
Well that's one reason i originally started the project that i've been working
on, Farnsworth. It was originally a direct clone of Frink but I have since
decided that i want to take it in a different direction (in syntax and
design). It's currently at the prototyping stage and is likely to change
drastically (i have LOTS of drastic plans for it). I'm currently working on
documentation and tests for the prototype so that i can understand what i
broke and when. you can read more about the project at
<http://simcop2387.info/> The prototype is currently resource hungry and
written in perl, but desgined for me to be easy to hack and change on so i can
replace parts of it as i decide i don't like them.

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Vivtek
Oh, how convenient; I don't have to worry about putting this in Perl. Be sure
to update to CPAN!

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WilliamLP
Does this offer anything that Wolfram Alpha doesn't?

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+a+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+calories+in+a+cubic+megaparsec+of+tomatos)

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monkey
Yeah, Frink is a Turing-complete programming language. That's a provably huge
difference. You can have loops, maintain state, store results in variables and
use them later, and define your own functions, so your calculations are
repeatable and can be more than one line. Can't do those things with Wolfram
Alpha. Frink has an unambiguous, documented syntax, rather than a bunch of
tricky and finicky hard-coded rules that try to parse English sentences.

