[pd-discuss] Using an intermediate language for pdcalc proposal

Thu Mar 10 10:44:50 UTC 2011

On 10 March 2011 00:11, Platonides <platonides at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everyone,

Great to hear from you!

> I am a MediaWiki developer, and long time Wikimedia Commons contributor.
> I am however new
> to the pd calculators concept/project. Primavera explained it less than
> an hour ago by irc.
>
> My first idea was that it would be cool having that as a MediaWiki
> extension installable in Commons.
> pdcalc using python and mediawiki being php would make it a bit hard,
> but the instructions are
> really simple, so it would be a 1:1 mapping. It could even be done

Couldn't you use the API [1] (which we are in the process of updating)
be that from PHP or javascript or ...

[1]: http://publicdomainworks.net/api

> automatically, using a python
> parser.
> However, the realization is that pdcalc doesn't need to be python at
> all. Or even Turing-complete.
> If it was coded into some basic intermediate language, it could be
> easily compiled into python, php,
> perl, ruby... whatever language you need. It would also allow some nice
> features, such an interpreter
> which instead of having all the variables set, goes asking you just when
> they are present in a conditional.
> Or recreating flowcharts from the code description (eg. compiling to
> graphviz).
>
> How does it sound to you?
>
> Which features/syntax do you think such intermediate language should have?

I think the problem is your intermediate language ends being quite
complicated but the working group is producing 'flow-charts' [2] from
experts as our main intermediate step.

[2]: http://publicdomaincalculators.okfn.org/flowcharts/

Rufus