Talk:Fractran

Should we create a category for this programming language? Might be interesting.--Grondilu (talk) 21:33, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Theoretically yes. Practically, probably not; writing Hello World in it would be prohibitively difficult (how to do meaningful I/O?) so the set of tasks it could do would be a bit too small. We can make the category when someone starts doing the tasks, not before. –Donal Fellows (talk) 21:54, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

"natural format"?

Why does the task have to tack on a text parsing requirement? It's irrelevant to the fraction Turing machine, and simply distracting. Why not let people focus on the important stuff? --Ledrug (talk) 17:19, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

I can argue this one both ways. On the one hand, we generally don't try to hide the ugly design choices of language designers, but let people post solutions to demonstrate all those ugly design choices, because it makes our own languages look prettier. :-) On the other hand, if Fractran is a programming language, one would expect it to have some parsing requirements. --TimToady (talk) 18:04, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

It seems to be a simple thing to do. I took it to mean parsing a format similar to that used in the task description. --Paddy3118 (talk) 20:46, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Saying you can't use % instead of / feels kinda like persecution to me. (After all, there's a slash in the middle of %, and fractions are ratios too.) So in the spirit of liberality I've taken the liberty to remove the 'incomplete' from Haskell. --TimToady (talk) 02:18, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Noted. But I will use this discussion page to voice my objection to this flagrant favouritism shown to the Haskel community in the least strident way available to me: humour! --Paddy3118 (talk) 07:26, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Several formulae rendered invisible to many browsers by cosmetic edits

Cosmetic edits made to the task page on Aug 6 2016, including the injection of spaces around expressions in <math> tags, have left several of the formulae completely invisible to all browsers which display the graphic file version of formulae rather than processing the MathML (this is, in fact, the majority of browsers). The MediaWiki processor does not currently expect such spaces, and generates syntactically ill-formed HTML if they are introduced. Other aspects of these edits may further compound the problem. Hout (talk) 17:48, 20 September 2016 (UTC)