New emulator and compiler

I've written an Emo syntax checker, emulator and .NET compiler. You can check them out on the Emulator and Emo.NET pages.

Emulator: http://emolanguage.blogspot.com/p/emulator.html

Emo.NET: http://emolanguage.blogspot.com/p/emonet.html

Changes round 1

So, we've decided not to restrict syntax, just discourage things like stacking 'noses.' After deciding upon emoticons, our goal was the make a language where each command, so to speak, was a complete emoticon. In short, this means ':ooo)' is bad form, and instead it should be coded as ':o) :o) :o)'. Even though less optimal, the code would still look like emoticons and it could be optimized in a compiler or emulator.

We also decided to add the '{', '}', and '|' characters to the language. They mean

{ = Copy the current register to the current memory location

} = Copy the current memory location to the register

| = No op

This should allow for shorter code, and more variation in the emoticons.

We've also changed the print to screen character as a result to be '@' so it's more like the yell emoticon. Additionally, 'o' and 'c' no longer are increment and decrement 5 operations, instead they are shift left and shift right, respectively.

How it began...

So, Dustin and I were sitting around in our closet at work, and I was looking up whether T-SQL is Turing complete. I never did find that out, but in the process ran across a language called Brainfuck that was quite entertaining. The obvious question to me was "hmmm, I wonder if I can make a language like that, but as a joke" So, the goal was set. Try to make a Turing complete language that was as minimal as possible without copying the others, all the while trying to keep some humor to it.

Dustin and I tried random symbols and came up with some interesting stuff, but when we stumbled across using emoticons it just took off. It seemed a good fit for what we were trying to do. Unfortunately, there's some excess to keep every line a smiley, but, nonetheless, it seemed to work out.

So, thus was born EMO. It's not complete, so as we change it and update it we'll make the changes here.

Yes, we know there's someone out there who wrote a higher level language using all emoticons, but we found it after the fact so we weren't too concerned with the un-originality of this.