Appendix I - Muq MUF for tinyMUCK MUF hackers

Some reasons I stuck with RPN notation for Muq's first programming syntax:

• A surprising number of my tinyMuck hacker friends reported that they actually liked tinyMuck MUF. To my surprise! (Before I surveyed them, I'd figured they all used it under protest.)
• Forth was developed for interactive at-the-keyboard hacking -- I can't think offhand of any other major language that was so designed. (Excepting tcsh & kith!) There is room for a syntax which works well in realtime mode.
• I've never seen anyone seriously try to drag a Forthlike language into the modern programming era: I found it fascinating to explore how much it could be improved with modern facilities without losing its essential character.
• I've always been distressed by how very bad tinyMuck MUF was -- in many ways it combines the worst aspects of the Algolic tradition (for example, explicit compile-edit-debug cycles, black-box compilers) with the worst aspects of the Forth tradition (for example, unreadable code, obscure bugs). That the original author of tinyMuck MUF was completely ignorant of Forth, compilers and interpreters is an explanation but not a justification... Why not a MUF that combined the best of those traditions?

Here is a quick guide to differences between Muq MUF and tinyMuck MUF for the experienced tinyMuck hacker:

• Muq lets you execute code directly from the internal commandline: No edit-compile-run cycle. You can also interact with Muq directly from the unix commandline (instead of telnetting in) if you prefer -- I usually do my interactive MUF hacking in an emacs shell window, which makes it trivial to paste code in, save printout, and edit and re-run recent expressions.
• Muq gives you local variables in functions -- no more of those awful swap drop rot dup sequences uglifying your code. Local variable assignment syntax is expr -> var and global variable assignment syntax is expr --> var.
• Muq gives you nice infix notations like a.b[i] for the common cases, to reduce code ugliness. The a[i] notation is used both for vectors and for the btree-based indices, which get used like Perl hashes.
• Muq gives you a variety of new and improved datatypes: Floats, ints good to over a thousand bits precision (with a modular expenentiation function fast enough to use for public-key signature sorts of stuff), structs, objects with multiple inheritance, hashed-btree based Index objects (used in place of propdirs), vectors, Lisp-style Lists, Perl4-style regular expressions, anonymous functions, thunks and promises with implicit forcing, pretty much you name it. And complex numbers are on the way! grin
• Muq gives you a variety of nice, vaguely C-like control constructs, including a case statement and lots of loops.
• Muq gives you full-strength C-style printf()s (]print) -- man, I miss those in languages like Java! Also C-style sscanf()s (unprint[), C-style strftime (printTime) and lots more goodies.
• Muq systematizes the notation for stackblocks and introduces dozens of operators on them like |sort and |uniq.
• Muq lets you declare the count of arguments accepted and returned by a function, and verifies that the declaration is correct. This is good documentation, and can prevent lots of obscure stack usage bugs.
• Muq gives you pre-emptive multi-tasking, so you can write MUF code that runs awhile (or even a daemon that runs indefinitely) without locking up the server completely. With this goes job forking, message streams with reader/writer synchronization, signals, jobsets, sessions, tcp/ip and udp via socket objects, millisecond-accurate times and sleeps...
• Muq gives you automatic storage management ("garbage collection") to allow serious programming without serious C-style memory leaks or pointer bugs.
• Muq gives you a ]rootPopenSocket primitive for running host subprocesses. This lets you easily interface the Muq server to external resources.
• Muq gives you packages to manage global namespace rationally, and dbfiles to divide the db between hostfiles rationally.
• Muq hides server process boundaries, so you can interact with data and jobs on other Muq servers across the Internet without even needing to know the data are remote. (Underneath, Muqnet uses both public-key and conventional crypto are used to secure remote operation.)
• Muq authenticates all message stream packets (including those from remote servers) -- spoofing is much less of a problem on Muq.
• Muq was written with lots of attention to space and time efficiency -- for example, instruction dispatch overhead was less than 1/3 that of fuzzball last I checked, and short strings are stored entirely within the pointer, incurring zero heap space and deallocation overhead.

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