retro html formatted by nom
comments/suggestions to: mjb at nomlang dot org
This is how you learn a language: listen carefully, repeat faithfully, express freely. mjb at nomlang.org, world-leading expert in nom, and hobby programmer
This folder contains a number of nom translation scripts which are also capable of translating themselves and other translation scripts as well.
The scripts which are currently working and reasonably debugged are rust | dart | perl | lua | go | java | javascript | ruby | python | tcl | c
Translation scripts which are recent (2025) have names like
/eg/nom.todart.pss or /eg/nom.tolua.pss and they are much better than
the older scripts which have names like /eg/translate.java.pss
or /eg/translate.tcl.pss But the older ones should still work for
translating many scripts.
There is also a helper nom script called /eg/nom.to.pss
which can translate any script to any other available language.
This script accepts the command in 'english' such as 'translate
<file> to ruby'
pep -f nom.to.pss -i 'palindrome.pss to rust' | bash
pep -f nom.to.pss -i 'nom.to.pss to perl' | bash
echo "palindrome.pss to lua" | ./nomto.pl
The nom scripts which I am currently writing (August 2025) all include
their own help system (usually triggered by the '/help' keyword or
some other help-word) and they also include self-translation which
is provided by the helper nom script /eg/nom.to.pss
Here are some examples of how to translate a script into a target language listed above.
pep -f nom.tolua.pss -i "r;[\n]{lines;add ' ';}print;d;"
pep -f nom.tolua.pss -i "r;[\n]{lines;add ' ';}print;d;" > test.lua
echo -e "leaf \nbranch\n twig" | lua test.lua
# This will print each line numbered, or run with a file at input
# (but won't number the first line!)
cat /usr/share/dict/words | lua test.lua
pep -f tr/nom.tolua.pss eg/nom.syntax.reference.pss > syntax.lua
echo "read;add '/';print;clear;" | lua syntax.lua
# or run with a file at input
cat eg/palindrome.pss | lua syntax.lua
# or use the command line switches for input
# (but this is more for testing purposes)
lua syntax.lua --file eg/palindrome.pss
# or
lua syntax.lua --input "read;add '/';print;clear;"
You can also use the bash functions in bumble.sf.net/books/pars/helpers.pars.sh to translate into a particular language. There are functions for each of the translator languages and they usually start with an abbreviation of the language name. If the function name ends with an 's' then it is for testing an in-line script in that language and if the fn name ends in 'f' then it is for translating/testing a script file. A double 's' ending means that second-generation testing will take place.
“Second-generation
” script translation is a fairly spiffing pep,nom concept that is documented
elsewhere but basically means translating the translator with itself
and then translating the target script into the same language and then
testing it. It's sort of a way of testing the “idem-potency” of the
translator. (There is an even more bizarrely amazing ℙ𝕖𝕡 🙵 ℕ𝕠𝕞 concept
which is contained in the interpret() method of the new perl translator
at /tr/nom.toperl.pss . This concept involves translating the perl
translator with itself and then using the translated-translator to
interpret nom scripts. But I digress... ).
pep.rbs 'read;add".";print;clear;' 'abcd'
pep.rus 'read;add".";print;clear;' 'abcd'
(I goes without saying - but I will say it - that you need the Rust compiler rustc to be installed for this to work)
pep.luaf script.pss '[a[b[c]]]'
The Dart translator uses a library for grapheme-cluster parsing, and
that library needs to be referenced in a pubspec.yaml file and downloaded
from the ether with 'pub get' or something similar. But actually the
nom translation helper script /eg/nom.to.pss will try to do all that
on your behalf (create the yaml file etc), but the bash helper scripts
will not.
In this section I annotate work carried out on, and updates to the various translation scripts.
31 Aug 2025
Made the interpret() method in the /eg/nom.toperl.pss script work
which is pretty historic, because it means that a completely new
pep and nom interpreter now exists (after nom.toperl.pss has
translated itself). I called the self translation /tr/nom.pl
and it even seems to work on big scripts like /eg/text.tohtml.pss
cat index.txt | ./nom.pl -E ../eg/text.tohtml.pss
So it is not necessary to translate the script to perl first nom.pl
is an interpreter.
28 Aug 2025
I am in the process of adding the system command to each
translation script. Also, I added the accumulator as an exit
code for the quit command which seems a simple and elegant
solution to allowing scripts to be pure recognisers .
June 2025
Created some new and much better translation scripts for
dart /tr/nom.todart.pss rust /tr/nom.torust.pss perl /tr/nom.toperl.pss
and lua /tr/nom.tolua.pss These scripts have all parsing code in
a parse() method and accept command-line switches for parsing from
a file or from <stdin> They also have better debugged escape
and unescape commands and are much more mindful and
thoughtful of Unicode and UTF8 and code-points and grapheme
clusters. At the very least they are designed to acknowledge the
problem of unicode code-points versus grapheme clusters. However
only the Dart translator currently actually parses grapheme clusters.
For much more information about work carried out on these amazing
translation scripts see the work journal at
/doc/pepnom.doc.journal.html