Some of you may be fa­mil­iar with weird pro­gram­ming lan­guages. Some of you may even know about bidi­men­sion­al lan­guages. Some of you may have seen Flip, where com­pu­ta­tion is per­formed by balls bounc­ing off things.

Now you can see Flip us­ing Qt. My Ra-Flip in­ter­preter. I wrote it in a lark af­ter find­ing out about Flip in Good Math, Bad Math and shares no code with the orig­i­nal, but it's a sim­ple lan­guage ;-)

It's al­most fea­ture-­com­plete. Miss­ing are:

• Lev­­els (to make it three­­d­i­­men­­sion­al)

• In­­put

• Start-stop-­­pause-de­lay con­trols

Here is the manda­to­ry screen­shot:

But that re­al­ly does­n't do it jus­tice, so here's a video:

The fun starts around 35 sec­onds in. The pro­gram prints an in­fi­nite se­ries of even num­bers and stores odd num­bers in a ... I am not sure how to call that. A cir­cuit?

I may think about writ­ing a some­thing-­to-Flip com­pil­er, so you can write your pro­grams in some sort of sim­plis­tic im­per­a­tive lan­guage and then see them as a pin­ball ma­chine.

It may be cute if an artist could spend a few hours mak­ing nicer gad­get­s, be­fore I do it (it won't be pret­ty ;-)

And yes, this is prob­a­bly the most use­less pro­gram writ­ten us­ing Qt, right there with kyes.