Maybe add (toy) programming language in the title?
I thought this would be a language integrating a time-travel debugger as main feature.
As a toy experiment it is fun, but shockingly useless if you come with such an expectation.
Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
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Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#12Okay but why? Sincerely: what is the pragmatic value? [edit: NM, end of the page... > Semantics and correctness of implementation It is not obvious how the Mariposa language could be given a formal semantics. Since there is no specification of its semantics, it doesn't even make sense to ask if the implementation is right or wrong. However, we are sure that the implementation is incorrect for almost any conceivable s…
Exactly, there's no rationale given, nor any practical example of where this would be useful. Mutability is already a source of complexity, adding time-traveling to it seems like it would just make it worse...
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#13Maybe add (toy) programming language in the title? I thought this would be a language integrating a time-travel debugger as main feature. As a toy experiment it is fun, but shockingly useless if you come with such an expectation.
You may be interested in https://whitebox.systems/
or this tech demo from Tomorrow Corporation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#14Related (and, to my mind, more thoroughly thought out): Elephant 2000
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might have to require that any code that uses the now/at constructs be wrapped in a macro invocation, e.g. (with-time-travel ...). The with-time-travel macro would then be a syntax transformer that rewrites the program. I'm not sure how, though... you'd have to enumerate all of the code blocks that are inside "at" forms, and then conditionally dispatch to them in the expansion of the "now" form; but that doesn't…
It's only legal for each `now` to be consumed by at-most one `at` form, so at that point you'd just be re-implementing the "timeline" and "instant" system from mariposa. The need to wrap the program in a form and the management of `now` "values" has me pondering the implications of IanTheHenry's macaroni[1] system, which (like the CSS :has operator) allow macros to climb up into manipulations of their parent forms--…
> perhaps a problem to not become too invested in
uh, case in point, that hypothetical closure would have some difficulty crossing module boundries (and that's assuming it gets away with re-writing top-level define forms), but still nothing technically incomputable, just supremely ill-advised and still closer to a reimplimentation of mariposa's semantics than a truely native concept emerging out of the continuations system
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#16Okay but why? Sincerely: what is the pragmatic value? [edit: NM, end of the page... > Semantics and correctness of implementation It is not obvious how the Mariposa language could be given a formal semantics. Since there is no specification of its semantics, it doesn't even make sense to ask if the implementation is right or wrong. However, we are sure that the implementation is incorrect for almost any conceivable s…
It's a toy language. A toy.
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#17Okay but why? Sincerely: what is the pragmatic value? [edit: NM, end of the page... > Semantics and correctness of implementation It is not obvious how the Mariposa language could be given a formal semantics. Since there is no specification of its semantics, it doesn't even make sense to ask if the implementation is right or wrong. However, we are sure that the implementation is incorrect for almost any conceivable s…
To test a Sapir-Whorf theory?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#18Okay but why? Sincerely: what is the pragmatic value? [edit: NM, end of the page... > Semantics and correctness of implementation It is not obvious how the Mariposa language could be given a formal semantics. Since there is no specification of its semantics, it doesn't even make sense to ask if the implementation is right or wrong. However, we are sure that the implementation is incorrect for almost any conceivable s…
Exactly, there's no rationale given, nor any practical example of where this would be useful. Mutability is already a source of complexity, adding time-traveling to it seems like it would just make it worse...
Initially I followed the link wondering if perhaps the author had done something interesting regarding append only ledgers and derivative generation processing semantics (e.g. event 5 modifies event 2, impacting the proper processing of events 3 and 4). After all, the linearity of the character stream is not unlike log offset/ledger row.
Frequently these esoteric languages have very interesting purposes.
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#19Okay but why? Sincerely: what is the pragmatic value? [edit: NM, end of the page... > Semantics and correctness of implementation It is not obvious how the Mariposa language could be given a formal semantics. Since there is no specification of its semantics, it doesn't even make sense to ask if the implementation is right or wrong. However, we are sure that the implementation is incorrect for almost any conceivable s…
To test a Sapir-Whorf theory? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Thanks, I kinda love this explanation
Re: Mariposa – A programming language with time-travel
#20Very confusing to call it time travel when it has nothing to do with time…