Have you ever thought of creating a programming language just for fun? Yes, I made an attempt to create my own Esoteric Programming Language based on ASCII characters.

What is an esoteric language?

Esoteric programming languages are weird languages created just for fun rather than for practical use.

Some examples include Befunge

 "dlroW olleH">:v
              ^,_@

LOLCODE

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

and Shakespeare

Act I: Hamlet's insults and flattery.

Long

Long is a simple, useless, minimal esoteric programming language created for fun. The language is based on ASCII characters. You can find the code in GitHub

72+#29+#7+##3+#79-# 55+#24+#3+#6-#8-#68-#1+# ;

How long works ??

The long programming language works like this:

• Takes the file to run
• The lexer breaks down the code into specific tokens and store them in an array
• The tokens are grouped into different commands.
• The commands are executed

How to use it??

Using long is pretty simple. You just have to create a project and run it.

To create a project, run

long new

and answer all the prompts and you are ready to go. To run the project, get into the project directory and run long run(Make sure you have the right file mentioned in the entry-point field in the long.json file). Or, you can directly mention the file name like this,

long <path-to-file>

The language works based on the value which is incremented and decremented

The main commands in the language are the following,
# for printing the current character
! for setting the value to 0
+, -, *, / for arithmetic operations

Arithmetic operations can be performed on the value which is initially set to 0. You can print out the current value converted to a character with the print command(#).

For example:

72+# 33+# ;

Result:

Hi

This piece of code will increase the value by 72 and print the value out. Again, the value is incremented by 33 and printed out.

Feel free to contribute on GitHub

To reach me just ping me on Discord and also, don't forget to join my Discord server.

Hope you got something new today. Thank you for scrolling and have a nice day.