❤ 💞 💕 💘 💕 💘 ❤ 💞
An Emoji stack language
Instead of standard Forth...
: factorial 0 swap begin dup 1 - dup 1 = until begin * over 0 = until swap drop ;
5 factorial .
>> 120
In HeartForth, factorial would be...
😀💥0💞👉💕1➖💕1🙏👍👉✖💑0🙏👍💞💔😉
5💥😘
>> 120
And Fibonacci...
😀🌿0 1💘0✋💑➕💞💕😘👌💔😉
10🌿
>> 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34
HeartForth is a dialect of Forth, a stack-oriented language. Where other programming languages use many data structures, Forth has a wealth of operators to manipulate the stack. Emoji has a large number of symbols which incorporate hearts. So....
| HeartForth | Standard Forth | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 💕 | dup | ( a -> a a ) |
| 💔 | drop | ( a -> ) |
| 💑 | over | ( a b -> a b a ) |
| 💘 | rot | ( a b c -> b c a ) |
| 💞 | swap | ( a b -> b a ) |
| 😘 | . | show last item on stack |
| ❤ | dump | show entire stack |
- Extremely compact.
- Clean visual separation between program and data.
- Whitespace agnostic.
- Fully internationalized; no bias for English speakers.
- None.
My friend Ian Baker wondered whether anyone had yet made an all-Emoji programming language. My first thought was to do a Lisp, but I was disappointed in how much the parentheses 🌘 🌒 dominated the visual look. What we needed was a language which was more stream-of-consciousness, like the way people use Emoji already.
A long time ago I had used another stack-based language,
PostScript. They have
this curious property of being streams of keywords with some data
mixed in. Just like a block of Emoji. Once I realized I could match
hearts to stack operators I knew I was onto something. The "revolving hearts" 💞 symbol
almost begs to be swap, and hearts have something to do with
holding something close or remembering it.
I originally tried implementing a new stack language in pure JavaScript, which was surprisingly easy to get started but surprisingly hard to do things like recursion well. So I decided to simply source-translate to an existing Forth implementation instead.
| HeartForth | Standard Forth | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 💕 | dup | ( a -> a a ) |
| 💔 | drop | ( a -> ) |
| 💑 | over | ( a b -> a b a ) |
| 💘 | rot | ( a b c -> b c a ) |
| 💞 | swap | ( a b -> b a ) |
| 😘 | . | show last item on stack |
| ❤ | dump | show entire stack |
| ➕ | + | add |
| ➖ | - | subtract |
| ✖ | * | multiply |
| ➗ | / | divide |
| 🙏 | = | equals |
| 📢 | > | greater than |
| 📡 | < | less than |
| 😀 | : | begin function definition |
| 😉 | ; | end function definition |
| ✋ | ?do | do block if > 0 |
| 👌 | loop | loop |
| 👉 | begin | start block |
| 👍 | until | end loop condition |
| 👐 | if | if |
| 👏 | then | then |
Aadit M. Shah posted this answer on Stack Exchange, which helped me get started.
The repl.it project and ForthFreak for bringing Forth to JavaScript.
On my blog at neilk.net.
For my lovely girlfriend Melanie. I heart you 100 factorial .