Write Software in Latin (2025) [video]
33 by akkartik · · youtube.com · 13 comments
Perl was there decades ago: https://metacpan.org/dist/Lingua-Romana-Perligata/view/lib/L...
Came here to say this :)
From: hermann@cpsc.ucalgary.ca (Michael Hermann)
Subject: Programmming awards
Date: 10 Feb 89
At Calgary, the computer science department has an award called
the Williams Cup (as in old stained coffee cup), which is given
yearly to the student who hands in the most imaginative
rendition of a regular programming assignment. Anyway, as the
story goes, the cup was awarded to a student who'd done a desk
calculator assignment. Seems that the prof hadn't specified
that you had to do it in decimal, so his/her program did math
with _roman_numerals_.
The clincher for the award must have been his/her programming
style, since of course, the documentation was in _latin_.
Sic itur ad astra! I spent some time and tokens generating these C99 applications and libraries all in classical Latin: https://github.com/jdb19937/apotheca. They all build with this C99 compiler + arm64 assembler + linker toolchain https://github.com/jdb19937/ccc (CCC = 300) which is included. But my favorite one of these repo is the 100+ test cases https://github.com/jdb19937/corpus that I used to iterate the compiler to bootstrappability. Nota: README.md ignorandum est. Anglice scriptum est ad barbaros ineruditos pecunia emungendos, lege LEGEME.md.
How did you compose the Latin? It seems... not very classical both in word selection and grammar. For example,
/* Est c consonans (non vocalis, non spatium, non littera non-Latina)? */
/* Estne c litera consonans (neque vocalis, neque spatium, neque litera linguae aliae)?
One way I felt the prerogative to influence it was in choice of vocabulary, for example "files" are plicae, non fasciculi, brevity FTW. I have a (private) CLAUDIUS.md file where I accumulated such guidance. Frankly I can't really tell where it lies on the spectrum of classical to vulgar, my memories of reading Cicero and Pliny have faded quite a bit, but I understand your point about the barbaric word order (next expeditio I'll take this into account). But it was still a worthwhile campaign in terms of refreshing that knowledge. Salve!
One thing he missed out on is using genders to represent variables of different types, having three `temp` variables with different names, comparators that take valueA, valueB et cetera.
Seems inaccurate to claim that "America" broke the Nazi's Enigma code - most of that work was done at Bletchley Park by British codebreakers, was it not? Of course Britian is still an Anglophone country and certainly lots of pioneering computing work in general was done in English by either Americans or British people, so it doesn't affect his broader point.
It was actually first cracked by Marian Rejewski at the Polish Cipher Bureau and the details were handed over to Bletchley Park at the start of the war.
Recte!
C already has vel and aut operators, but now we can name them as such!
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Cast some spells!
When he started reading latin in a japanese accent I lost it