Steve's Wacky Programming

By steve  on Mon 20 of Sep., 2004 18:03 EDT

I'm sure some of you have seen some strange programming languages out there, like eiffel, intercal, K, brainfuck. If not, do a google on each of those and you'll be in for a treat. Any way, what I'm about to bring up is something truly mind boggling: programming in 3 dimensions.

I've seen one language in particular called BeFunge that gives a user a fixed size 2d programming environment, where every instruction is a single character and the instruction pointer (like the pc register in Intel cpus) can move around freely left, right, up or down. 3d adds another dimension to that and now you have 6 directions: down, left, right, forward and back.

What I'm getting at is, would a beast such as this be worthwhile? Currently I have a VM (virtual machine, like a java interpreter) in the works that does exactly this, with the hopes that it could possibly provide a way to write extremely dense code in 3 dimensions, using less space than a typical compiled binary would yet be just as good if not better. The only drawback is there is no way at the moment to write source in the ways we are used to, using a text editor or other tool to generate "source code" for the vm. All I have at the moment is equivalent to writing x86 machine code by hand in a hex editor. Granted this gaurantees that what you write is what you intended, but hex editing a large 64x64x64 cube of hex code is a bit of a task, even for me. I have a visual tool in the works as well, sort of a 3d hex editor, based on opengl and its almost there, but for this to really be useful, there has to be some way to type in semi-english looking code in a file and produce the same hex output the vm expects. Any ideas, thoughts, flames are welcome. Just be gentle =)