ℙ𝕖𝕡 🙴 ℕ𝕠𝕞

Grammar is the syntax of the universe. Trueism

the ℕ𝕠𝕞 chars command

append the number of characters read to the end of the workspace buffer

   read; 
   (eof) { 
     clear; add "read "; chars; add " characters.";
     print; 
   }
 

The code above is almost equivalent to the unix wc -c command except that it will be a bit slower.

The chars command just does what it says on the box: it takes the value from the character counter in the pep virtual machine and appends it (as a string or text) to the end of the workspace buffer with not intervening spaces. The point of this command is to point out to the hapless user of your wonderful programming language or pattern recogniser where he or she went so hopelessly wrong. Every compiler or interpreter or simple syntax checker does this, and so should yours.

But we need to unpack this a little. What is a “character"? ” Can you alter the character counter? The first question is not trivial and possibly has no answer owing to a thing called unicode combining marks or “grapheme clusters” . In a nutshell, a unicode “grapheme” (what we see on the page or screen as a single character) can consist of a base character followed by any number of combining marks.

But it’s ok, some of the nom translators can handle grapheme clusters. Well, actually at the moment on the dart translator. But the rust translator should be able to when it is finished (getting there may 2025).

You can set the pep character counter to zero with the nochars command but you can't do anything else to it, except print it. This is one of these funny little artificial restrictions that I like to place on the nom and pep virtual machine, with the idea of keeping everything as simple as possible. One day you will see the wisdom of this.