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    <title>Cat's Eye Technologies: The SMETANA Language</title>
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<h1>SMETANA</h1>
<P>Chris Pressey, 1994(ish)
<hr>

<p>A long time ago (about six years ago),
I was writing some amusing notes to
myself and among them was an "algorithm
that'll never fly," which went
something like:

<p>&nbsp;&nbsp;1. Swap steps one and two.
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;2. Flap wings.
<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;3. Go back to step one.

<p>It then occurred to me that reducing
this form to the absurd (removing
the "Flap wings" instruction) just <i>might</i>
fail to yield a totally untractable language.

<p>I originally wrote the interpreter as a Visual Basic
application and named it SMETANA - both an acronym
for "Self-Modifying, Extremely Tiny AutomatoN
Application", and a reference to the composer of
the same name.

<ul><p><i>Turns out that the word</i> smetana <i>is
also Russian for</i> sour cream<i>.  What do you know?
Finally, I join the all-too-exclusive club of people
who have invented a language
named after a foodstuff!</i></ul>

<p>The dsitribution available here is a much better
implementation of the SMETANA interpreter in
a much more device-independent and scalable form.
I have retained the English syntax exactly.  The
program ends when it tries to peform step
number <i>n</i>, where <i>n</i> is one plus the number
of steps given in the source.

<!--
<p>Todo: mine information about SMETANA's Turing-Complete
status from the e-mail archives
-->

<p>Syntax of the SMETANA Language:

<pre>  Smetana ::= Step {".\n" Step} ".".
  Step    ::= "Step" Integer "." (GoTo | Swap).
  GoTo    ::= "Go" "to" "step" Integer.
  Swap    ::= "Swap" "step" Integer "with" "step" Integer.
  Integer ::= "0".."9" {"0".."9"}.</pre>

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