Recto – A Truly 2D Language • Hacker News Board

Re: Recto – A Truly 2D Language

#21

Post by Mithriil » Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 3:27 PM UTC

hamstor wrote: post #7

Why the tight limit of only 2 dimensions? Seems unnecessary. A more general approach would be to support an arbitrary amount of dimensions

Three cheers for the language that naturally requires a VR headset to visualize 5D tensor logic.

Re: Recto – A Truly 2D Language

#22

Post by mockingloris » Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 3:30 PM UTC

Truly interesting read! @mhagiwara The article reads very well.

With the bandwidth left from parsing all that new information, all I can say is this is something. I know there's still a whole lot of figuring out to do.

(I imagine if there were peeps from other-than-earth, they'd probably communicate in a manner as this - depicted in the "Arrival" movie)

Thanks for sharing. I'll be donating a star on github and keeping watch-O

Re: Recto – A Truly 2D Language

#23

Post by omoikane » Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

keyle wrote: post #5

There is a whole category of multiple dimension languages on esolang [1]... Nothing you'd really want to use other than to impress someone. No languages captures time as a dimension, yet. [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Esolang:Categorization#Dimensions

> No languages captures time as a dimension, yet.

Maybe not exactly, but there was one task[1] in ICFPc 2024[2] where you create programs that are laid out in 2D, and there is a special operator that causes the control flow to travel back in time. It was super fun.

[1] https://github.com/icfpcontest2024/icfpc2024/blob/main/stati...

[2] https://icfpcontest2024.github.io/

Re: Recto – A Truly 2D Language

#24

Post by S4M » Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 3:47 PM UTC

There is also thje 2D dialect of Racket: https://docs.racket-lang.org/2d/

Re: Recto – A Truly 2D Language

#25

Post by entaloneralie » Fri, Aug 15, 2025, 3:50 PM UTC

keyle wrote: post #5

There is a whole category of multiple dimension languages on esolang [1]... Nothing you'd really want to use other than to impress someone. No languages captures time as a dimension, yet. [1] https://esolangs.org/wiki/Esolang:Categorization#Dimensions

Besides Orca, Befunge, etc.. the McCulloch-Pitts Neuron is a graphical language with a discrete timestep, it solves some of the shortcomings of Orca and Recto where the evaluation has to do a lot of walking to traverse space.

https://www.i-programmer.info/babbages-bag/325-mcculloch-pit...

It does so by creating instant connection between events across large distances.

Its inerrant parallalelism makes it also possible to do pretty complex evaluation on large canvases.