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BOP: Ball Oriented programming

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:

flip.png

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.

Mark C Chu-Carroll / 2007-04-28 01:02:

The video link doesn't work; my ogg player claims the file is corrupt.

Roberto Alsina / 2007-04-28 02:53:

I can't stream it, but I can download it and then play it.

Roberto Alsina / 2007-04-28 02:54:

I forgot: using mplayer.

Frank / 2007-04-28 12:11:

This looks a lot like the game Reaction from Freeverse. It is the first one you can see in the video here, after Minesweeper:

http://www.freeverse.com/br...

Used to be available for free download, but I think that was a limited-time offer.


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