HeartForth

❤ 💞 💕 💘 💕 💘 ❤ 💞

An Emoji stack language

Synopsis

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

Discussion

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

Advantages

• Extremely compact.
• Clean visual separation between program and data.
• Whitespace agnostic.
• Fully internationalized; no bias for English speakers.

Disadvantages

• None.

Motivation

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.

Complete glossary (so far)

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

Thanks to

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.

Mirrored

On my blog at neilk.net.

Dedication

For my lovely girlfriend Melanie. I heart you 100 factorial .