BaSiX – A Basic interpreter written in TeX (1990) [pdf]

[thiagoharry]

http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb11-3/tb29greene.pdf

[jez]

This reminds me of a homework assignment in one of my freshman year classes which was to implement various church encodings and helper functions in the lambda calculus using only LaTeX macros!

[jandrese]

Was this published on April 1? It looks like a complete paper on the surface with example code and everything. Who asked for this?

Sadly the FTP server mentioned in the paper is no longer up, and the supplied IP address has been repurposed.

[sctb → jandrese]

Also in the tradition of ambitious TeX is this 2008 winner of the Judge's Prize for the ICFP Programming Contest: http://sdh33b.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html (contest link: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~sheard/2008IcfpContest/).

[pmiller2 → jandrese]

I suspect this is just the code equivalent of performance art (with the emphasis on art). People do a lot of funny things just because they can, and, since source is embedded in the paper, I’m guessing this wasn’t just an April Fools prank.

[pronoiac → jandrese]

It looks like there's a copy in CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/basix