#Ternary Programming Language
Ternary is a programming language consisting of the ASCII characters 0, 1, and 2. It is based on the concepts of the BF (1993), Ook! (2009), and P'' (1964) programming languages. It can be considered a trivial BF command substitution and has similarities with the Rule 110 elementary cellular automaton (which uses 3 bits to represent 8 states).

The language is Turing-complete, making it theoretically capable of computing any computable function or simulating any other computational model, if given access to an unlimited amount of memory.

The standard library consists of an I/O byte-stream, and the language supports memory read/write operations, conditional branches, and loops.

Examples

hello world

11111111111111110201111111110201111101111111011111110111000000001012011101110110010111020012
00101201012001101010201111111111111120201111112001012000102000201111112010101010101020101010
1010101010200101112001111120

cat

2102200210122112 (a program that echoes its input [this is a comment])

Fibonacci sequence

1111111111111111111111 <--- increment how many numbers to count
01110101010111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111000000000000020102
01010101010111011100000000000000101201010101010101020000000000000011010101010101011012000201
11111111111111111111021000100201011101110000001012010101020000001101010110121100020102101200
02101212010200000201010111000000101201010210121200001201010102010111011100000010120101010200
00001101010110121100020102101200021012120102000011010102101212000000000000001201010101010211
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11200210121211111111111111111111000210011000120111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111112002101200000000000000000000000002010101
11011100000000101201010101020000000011010101011012001002010120012000000002101212000002010111
01110000001012010101020000001101010110120000020011011012010200110110120000001012

More can be found in the examples folder of the project root.

Usage

root@box:~# git clone https://github.com/zerosum0x0/ternary.git
root@box:~# cd ternary
root@box:~/ternary# g++ -std=c++11 ternary.cpp -o ternary

root@box:~/ternary# ./ternary < examples/hello.ter
Hello World!
root@box:~/ternary# ./ternary < examples/fibonacci.ter
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89

Interpreter

The main interpreter is written in under 30 lines of C++11. It reads instructions from standard input and then executes the sequence. There is no hard-coded limit on memory for tape frames. Faster, smaller, and less memory-intensive implementations are far more than likely possible.

Ternary is able to become self-hosted (or self-reproducing), meaning that a Ternary interpreter can be written in Ternary itself.

Compiler

To create a compiler, jump tables can be added to existing BF implementations. One that creates Linux ELF files should be possible to accomplish in ~150 bytes of x86.

Converter

There is a Python script which can be used to convert existing BF code into Ternary. The behavior of ill-formed code to the default interpreter is undefined (see common BF implementation issues). There is an examples folder in the project root.

Todo

• Self-hosted interpreter (based on dbfi)


• Linux ELF compiler


• Non-ASCII implementation, opcodes stored within a single byte, in the high and low bits

Acknowledgements

Ternary would not be possible without work by the following people:

• 
  Corrado Böhm, for creating the P'' language in 1964.


• 
  Urban Müller, for creating the BF language in 1993.


• 
  Oleg Mazonka and Daniel B. Cristofani, for dbfi and the dbfi-BF interpreter in 2003.


• 
  David Morgan-Mar, for creating the Ook! language in 2009.