esofiles/hunter/doc/hunter.txt

                Concurrent Maze Space Transformation
              (with Authentic Interrodent Communication)
                 In The HUNTER Programming Language


It is perceived that one of the biggest problems in maintaining
interest in programming is the above linear growth of boredom
compared to the usefulness of the program, resulting in an
acute loss of enthusiasm on the part of the programmers and
ultimately the abandonment of the software.

This document intends to address that by introducing a language
with new models for sharing, flow control, and data manipulation,
which make all dependencies in a program globally accessible and
radically oblique at the language level.

We introduce the language, which is a deterministic particle
automaton based on mazespace-rewriting and critter-style message
passing and, being ASCII art, is inherently graphical in notation...


The HUNTER Programming Language
(c)2000-2002 Cat's Eye Technologies.  All rights reserved.

Each HUNTER program consists of a two-dimensional Cartesian-grid
playfield of any reasonable arbitrary size.  Each square in this
grid is called a cell.  Each cell may contain one of several
things, or be considered 'empty'.  It may also contain a mouse,
which is a particularly special kind of thing.  However, a mouse
must start in an otherwise empty square.

Mice are particularly special because they have agency.  Unlike
walls and pieces of cheese, they do things.  Primarily, they move
around.  They do so at runtime.

The deterministic fashion a mouse moves around - always checking
east, then north, then west, then south, in each cell - and its
memory (each mouse keeps a 'map' of where it's been in it's head
and tries not to backtrack unless there is nowhere else new to
go) ensures that, given some time, and all other things being
equal, a mouse will traverse it's entire environment and will
return to where it started.  The process then repeats, holding
the mouse in a state of perpetual live lock.

However, not all other things may be equal.  Indeed, the mouse
may nibble on a bit of strychnine and die.  Or, other mice may
be concurrently tranversing the same maze, and two mice may not
share the same space, so they may block each other's progress.

Mice may not move through walls but they may move through empty
space and on top of items found in the playfield, possibly
altering them (see below.)

Execution ends when all mice are dead.

An example HUNTER program might be:

########
#   1#2#
# #### #
#      #
# ######
#     m#
#+######
#     !#
########

where

  # indicates a wall
  m indicates a mouse
  the digits 0 to 9 represent types of cheese
  0 = cheddar
  1 = american
  2 = swiss
  3 = gouda
  4 = mozzarella
  5 = farmer
  6 = blue
  7 = gorgonzola
  8 = feta
  9 = bat's-milk
  ! indicates a bit of strychnine
  + indicates a pinwheel
  . indicates a mouse turd
  w indicates a dead mouse carcass

  other characters indicate other miscellaneous objects
  apropos to being in a maze, with undefined semantics,
  so they should be considered reserved

Intermouse communication is done by mouse droppings.  A mouse
can leave a message to some other mouse by creating a mouse
dropping where it currently is (assuming it has previously
eaten a piece of cheese.)  Other mice can detect mouse
droppings and change their behaviour based on them.

How mice create droppings is defined by how each mouse is
trained.  These mice are somewhat magical in that they can
be trained to perform physically improbable tasks, such as
turning one kind of cheese into another.

Mice are trained globally by the mazespace-rewriting
rules.  These are the guidelines by which rodents live their
lives.  Each rule must be on a line by itself and has the
following form:

  *things>droppings

For example,

  *12>21

Then, when a mouse encounters a piece of American cheese,
followed by a piece of Swiss cheese, it will eat them and
excrete a bit of Swiss cheese followed by a bit of American
cheese.  This is just an example.

Mice will eat cheese but will not eat mouse droppings,
pinwheels, or other inedible items.

Specifying strychnine, walls, or mice on the left-hand side
of a rewriting rule is not guaranteed to be able to produce
a match.  The behaviour of specifing mice on the right-hand
side of a rewriting rule is undefined.



Chris Pressey
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Original Oct 24 2000
Revised for clarity Jan 26 2002