Raw, non-pretty-printed output

[evan-goode]

I'm writing a ray tracer in Bruijn and I want my program to output a BMP file. It would be great if the bruijn CLI had a flag to disable (1) echoing of the input, (2) the *> and ?> decorators, and (3) the pretty-printing of the output. I just want the program's raw output bytes on stdout, and nothing else! :)

For now, I'm dumping my Bruijn program to BLC and executing it with SectorLambda. Related: #2.

[marvinborner]

What kind of output would you expect to be "raw"? In my opinion the only raw output is blc, where such decorators and echoing is already disabled. For the BLC of a reduced term I typically just use the repls :blc <t> command.
The "humanified" versions of lambda terms are not stable and mostly for humans to interpret the produced term. I suspect you output the BMP as a Church list of binary-encoded chars?

Good luck with the raytracer, very ambitious! If you want an even larger challenge, I suggest trying to write to a lambda-based encoding like marvinborner/lambda-screen :)

[evan-goode]

I see what you're saying. I guess what I want is not "raw", rather, I want Bruijn to interpret the reduced term as bytes.

What I mean is: when I run bruijn --output-bytes myfile.bruijn, Bruijn should execute myfile.bruijn, and if the resulting expression is a valid Church list of Binary numbers representing bytes (Binary numbers between 0 and 255 inclusive), output those bytes to stdout. Otherwise, if the reduced term does not match that pattern, throw an error.

Currently, Bruijn will humanify some of those bytes as e.g. 0b (if they are invalid ASCII/UTF-8?) and some as chars 'a' or strings "ab". I want to skip the "humanification" and just output the bytes directly (if in fact they are valid bytes).

I think this is effectively what SectorLambda does, but there may be some subtle differences.

[evan-goode]

Good luck with the raytracer, very ambitious! If you want an even larger challenge, I suggest trying to write to a lambda-based encoding like marvinborner/lambda-screen :)

Thanks! I've wanted to build a ray tracer in BLC for a while, ever since I made https://github.com/evan-goode/LambdaLisp for a university project. I got stuck trying to get ternary numbers working in my language, so I'm glad to see that Bruijn has that and lots more (Real, Rational).

The next problem to solve is that sqrt on Reals is quite slow... I might look into ways to approximate it, or implement fp16 math and switch to that.

I saw LambdaScreen, looks interesting! Might not be too hard to port it when it's done.