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Devine Lu Linvega

Implementing structural editing in #uxntal. I remember having lots of fun with THINK Pascal when the IDE was reformatting my program automatically and I've been meaning to have this as part of my workflow now.

31 comments
Csepp 🌒

@neauoire This is really neato. πŸ‘€
Structural editing is part of why I want to use a TLV based "sourceless" representation in my PocketViewer thingy. (The other is compactness.)
It's interesting that the builtin microlisp editor is also technically just a structural editor for lists, but the interface is like ed(1).
Unixy software wastes so much code space and CPU cycles with parsers, so for a truly low tech solution, I think it's best to stick to a single simple grammar.

Devine Lu Linvega

@csepp I agree, these source files as so tiny! This is all assembled code right, so the only strings in the project are label names and comments.

It was surprisingly easy to implement, it'll change how I code a lot I suspect.

Csepp 🌒

@neauoire Wait what, so you are technically using a disassembler / binary editor? That is even cooler than what I thought was going on. πŸ‘€

Devine Lu Linvega

@csepp yeah, it assembles and disassembles, keeping comments and all types of labels. The source code is actually the binary file itself along with the symbols file.

Csepp 🌒

@neauoire Ohh so that's why Oquonie comes with a symbols file, I thought it was just for debugging.
Btw does the hex editor not have an ASCII column? It's kind of hard to make sense of what's going on without any recognizable strings.

Devine Lu Linvega

@csepp ah yes that's not a hex editor, that's just left, here's the hex editor with the ascii data, and overlapped in the step debugger, and the raw binary.

Lac Meod

@neauoire
And I guess you have enjoyed the HP48 code editor that was maybe rudimentary, but useful :D

Devine Lu Linvega

I have this crazy idea in mind that goes something like this, in a single keystroke:

- Assemble a program in the classic uxn self-modification style
- Run tests that records "fitness" in the routine's literals and iterator boundaries
- Save the modified image
- Disassemble it and keep working

mcc

@neauoire So one thing about evolutionarily evolving "programs" is that code tends to have a "rough" fitness landscape, so that the shortest-(hamming/edit)-distance path between two fit points may be mostly unfit or mostly nonfunctional. My conclusion working with this sort of thing only works well when the shape of the fitness landscape can be made smooth. Then again, if the peturbation is being done by a human mind instead of an algorithm, maybe you actually *can* find good outcomes that way

Devine Lu Linvega

@mcc right now I'm focusing on two cases where I can raise warnings:

- Ranges that can be reduced, where the boundaries of the tests never reach the literal boundaries set in the program.
- Linear logic that can be reduced.

nf

@neauoire are the labels and comments stored in the sym file?

Max Cahill

@neauoire kickass πŸ’ͺ and then the images too πŸ˜‰

Josh Dick :mac:

@neauoire Off-topic, but that Cream font you customized looks glorious every time I see it in one of your posts. I’m curious if there’s any existing way to convert the UFX font to something like OTF?

Devine Lu Linvega

@josh I'm not too familiar with the OTF format, but the ufx format should be easy to convert to a bitmap :) Maybe you can do bmp/tga -> otf?

Josh Dick :mac:

@neauoire Thanks, will have to tinker with it! Already found your specs of course, but figured I’d ask about any existing tools before attempting to write my own.

Devine Lu Linvega

@josh let me know if you need a hand getting to the glyph data in the binary file.

You can use this to see what to expect: wiki.xxiivv.com/site/turye.htm

Josh Dick :mac:

@neauoire Thanks so much for offering, will see how far I get once I find some free time to tinker with it. And had already poked around in Turye ☺️

Josh Dick :mac:

@neauoire A few missteps after slightly misunderstanding the spec but I got there! The harder part is going to be figuring out how to turn the pixel data back into a bitmap/raster font. To be continued!

Devine Lu Linvega

@josh Oh sorry I linked to the wrong htm file, I meant to send to ufx_format.htm

Josh Dick :mac:

@neauoire I originally tried laying out all the tiles contiguously in the specified order (2x tiles tall for UF2), and then selecting slices from that offsetting by character widths, which was as wrong as it was overcomplicated.

The way it acutally works obviously makes way more sense -- pixel data is always the same size and the character widths are just bounds inside it.

This is obvious in retrospect but somehow wasn't to me at the beginning! πŸ˜…

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