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Show HN: Rhubarb – C89 Libraries in Latin

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Re: Show HN: Rhubarb – C89 Libraries in Latin

#11
post #6
post #4

What's going on in RELAX.md?

RELAX.md is odd, but I am even more concerned about SABAW1.md and SABAW2.md.

I think talking to AI in XML is very promising! It is kind of like moving from a 1d semantic plane to a 2d semantic plane.

I think it could be a cool way to work around some of the limitations of GAN for text as a training technique.

Re: Show HN: Rhubarb – C89 Libraries in Latin

#12
post #9

I like this project, because it's fundamentally insane. I really enjoyed reading your CLAUDE.md and related documents, as someone with a religious philosophy background, it was a really wild ride and I am now very curious about how Claude feels going through the onboarding process. You're essentially "breaking the brain" of Claude and then having it work on your code. Do you have Claude also read show_bible.md?

I am experimenting with show bible as an “advanced vibe coding technique” for documenting modules, maybe an episode per module?

Claude seems to respond positively! You can always clone the repo, run the /hello-world slash command in claude code and then ask it what it thinks? Can be a fun conversation to ask it to introspect.

Re: Show HN: Rhubarb – C89 Libraries in Latin

#13
post #8

This same author's Aquinas OS also looks interesting -- although it is not in Latin. https://github.com/farant/aquinas

I started aquinas first, that was a very interesting learning experience! Not as hard to get stuff on the screen targeting an emulator as your “machine” as I would have thought.

Re: Show HN: Rhubarb – C89 Libraries in Latin

#14
post #7

Interesting! Back in the '80s, before AI could quickly produce such things, I had created a "Greek" version of the C language -- obviously named "Γ". A lot of preprocessor definitions were involved for keyword translation, as one can imagine. Translating the C standard library was a much more difficult process: it involved patching the compiler/linker on a BSD system, since you could not have non-ASCII symbols (funct…

Wow! That sounds amazing. I did experiment with using non latin characters for conventions like mu but I think I ran into some suprising rough edges working with claude that made me abandon it, forget what exactly they were though.

Working in C is such a breath of fresh air compared to typescript, go, etc. I love having pure text substitution macros.

Re: Show HN: Rhubarb – C89 Libraries in Latin

#15
post #5

Very impressive - there is a lot of work here! But why? They explain it in docs/latina.h.md | In include/latina.h , they use the C preprocessor to redefine the C keywords in Latin. Also, many numeric constants -- instead of 4096 you write MMMMXCVI . The other files in docs explain each library routine in English, but the code samples are in Latin. The source files - a lot of them! - are in include and lib . The code…

I am slowly learning bits of latin doing this. And Claude does say that it makes it read the code less on “autopilot” because it has to stop and translate the code. Don’t know how big a difference that is though!
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