Encoding.md

Encoding

Think about two problems:

1. How to write a macro to decide whether two strings are equal?
2. How to write a if macro to do the conditional execution? More specifically, write a macro if(c,x,y), it returns x if c is true, and y if c is false (assume that c can either be true or false).

First, we define true and false by:

true() {"T"}

false() {"F"}

They are represented by string literals.

To directly implement the eq macro is quite hard.

We have to first implement the encode and decode macro to help us.

Encoding

Encoding means to encode a string into another string that has some special properties that we can use.

Cat

We want cat to concatenate two strings. It is possible by using rep2.

cat(x,y) {
    rep2("\$","\",x,"$",y)
}

rep2(s,x1,y1,x2,y2) {
    var s1 = {
        "\$$" = enc(y1);
        "\$$$" = enc(y2);
        "\$$$$" = enc(x2) + "$";
        enc(x2) = "\$$$";
        enc(x1) = "\$$";
        enc(s)
    };
    dec(s1)
}

Code

enc(x) {
    "$" = "\$";
    "\" = "\\";
    x
}

dec(x) {
    "\\" = "\";
    "\$" = "$";
    x
}