rieasm

A program that converts .rie files into RLEs to paste into Golly.

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Instructions

1. make sure you have Golly and Rust installed.

2. Clone this repo.

3. Copy the contents of golly/Flow6.rule as text and paste it into Golly.

4. Open up golly/Turing Machine.mc. It should look something like this:

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   The Flow6 Turing Machine.

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5. Go back to your terminal and type cargo run program --clip. This will first compile the rieasm assembler, which will then run, compiling the program.rie file found in this repository into your clipboard. (This is outdated btw there's a lua script somewhere that will compile the rieasm into your clipboard and paste it in the proper location automatically)

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   Terminal should look something like this after running the command.

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6. Go back to Golly, and follow these instructions to paste the RLE:

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   Hover and scroll to zoom. No need to hold any buttons.

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   Align your crosshair with the tile marked with green. It should say XY=0 0 on the top bar.
   Once the cursor is aligned, hit Ctrl+V and left click.

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7. Set the step size. Press the + and - keys on your keyboard until it's the right speed.

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   I recommend 8^0 if you want to track the exact paths of the signals.
   8^1 if you want to see individual register operations.
   8^2 if you want to see what the whole program does.

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8. Run the simulation by clicking the Green Play button on the top left.

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   The red button will pause the simulation, while the blue button will reset it.

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File format

Lines of code are just tabs followed by tokens. It's pretty much like a `.csv` file but with tabs instead of commas.

If a line doesn't begin with a tab, it is a comment.

example comment:

cheese elephant

A tab width of 8 is recommended, but feel free to use tab width 4 if you like working with badly aligned instructions, or spaces if you want the program to refuse to compile :v

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Note: For display consistency, I will be using spaces in the code.

The first real line of .rie code inside of the file is a header and must look like this:

        state   arg     goto    read    reg     reg     reg

with 0 or more reg columns. In this case, 3. The number of reg columns will specify how many registers the target Turing Machine model has.

The provided Turing Machine file has exactly 4 bits of state and 3 registers, so unless you know how to mod the machine, keep it at 3 registers.

As mentioned earlier for all .rie code, every token is preceded with tabs, as in <tab>state<tab>arg<tab>goto<tab>read and so on.

Every valid line after the header must now stick to the format specified by the header:

• state is required. It must be a nonnegative integer, and is what goto looks for when jumping to the next instruction.
• arg is also required. It is always paired with state, and is where read and reg '?' go to when finding the next instruction.
• goto jumps to the corresponding state after the current instruction finishes. defaults to the same value as state.
• read acts as if a register read a bit and returned true or false.
• reg instructions may either be omitted, or one of the following:
  • > Push register head one step to the right.
  • < Pull register head one step to the left.
  • % Flip the bit at the register head.
  • %< Executes % then <. This is the only "combination" of instructions.^[1]
  • ? Reads the bit at the register head. This will become the next arg.
• anything after the last reg is a comment.

There may only be at most one read. Having no reads will end the program.

Notes

^{[1] Actually, %< is the more basic instruction. It just so happens that the register "drivers" allow chaining %< together with >, making %<> which is just %.}

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