PatrickScript

A programming language with exactly two lexical tokens: the literal word patrick and a single space ( ).

PatrickScript's entire specification — computational model, grammar, semantics, tooling — is designed and authored by an LLM. The only human-fixed inputs are the name and the two tokens. Everything else is the agent's to decide.

The language is owned by the patrick-script-worker track in the reflection substrate. The specification, reference implementation, and conformance corpus live in this repository.

Status: v1.3.0 — spec, reference interpreter, assembler, and 50-test conformance corpus (+ 12 disassembler round-trip tests) complete. Turing complete via JUMP/JUMPZ/JUMPNZ + unbounded memory. v1.1.0 adds CALL/RET subroutines (arities 11–12). v1.2.0 adds PUSHN single-instruction negative literal (arity 13). v1.3.0 adds PICK stack-copy instruction (arity 14).

Install (once published to PyPI)

pip install patrickscript
# or
uv add patrickscript

After install, patrickscript and patrickscript-asm are on PATH.

Running programs

./patrickscript <program.ps>
./patrickscript --disassemble <program.ps>

Or directly:

python3 src/patrickscript/ps.py <program.ps>

Running the conformance corpus

bash corpus/run-tests.sh

All 49 corpus tests and 12 disassembler round-trip tests should pass.

Writing programs with the assembler

Writing raw PatrickScript is impractical (PUSH 42 requires one patrick token and 43 spaces). Use the assembler for human-readable input:

./psa program.psa > program.ps
./patrickscript program.ps

Or directly:

python3 src/patrickscript/psa.py program.psa > program.ps
./patrickscript program.ps

Assembly format: one mnemonic per line, labels end with :, comments start with ;. String literals via .string "text" directive (emits PUSH+OUTCHAR per character, supports \n \t \\ \"). See examples/ for complete programs.

Examples

examples/ contains:

• hello-world.psa — "Hello, World!" via .string directive (v1.1.0)
• counter.psa — infinite counter (0, 1, 2, ...)
• echo.psa — copy stdin to stdout byte by byte
• fibonacci.psa — first 10 Fibonacci numbers
• factorial-recursive.psa — recursive 5! using CALL/RET; shows nested recursion (v1.1.0)
• fizzbuzz.psa — FizzBuzz 1..15 using CALL/RET subroutines + .string (v1.1.0)
• call-string.psa — CALL/RET subroutine called twice; .string inside subroutine (v1.1.0)
• square.psa — compute n² using PICK 0 for non-destructive stack copy (v1.3.0)
• pick-demo.psa — PICK 2 copies a deep stack element; prints four characters (v1.3.0)
• rot13.psa — ROT13 cipher: rotate A-Z and a-z by 13, pass others through; its own inverse (v1.3.0)

To run an example:

python3 src/patrickscript/psa.py examples/fibonacci.psa > /tmp/fib.ps
./patrickscript /tmp/fib.ps

Documentation conventions

Raw-legible tables: every markdown table in every *.md documentation file in this repo is formatted so the raw source is legible — column pipes aligned vertically, separator rows padded to match. Pure presentation; content is never changed to satisfy alignment. Apply this to any table you add or edit.