Saturday, March 11, 2017

Trump, the Cyber-coding language

There ought to be a programming ("cyber"-coding) language that reflects Donald Trump's handling of information, both for the fun of creating and wielding it, and for the assistance it could provide in making his circumlocutions explicit.

Obviously, any such effort should be crowd-sourced, complete with a GitHub project. Unfortunately, I am neither a good enough programmer nor familiar enough with the ins and outs of open source software to contribute much of value to any such effort, but I do have a few suggestions.

Booleans should have four states: true, false (false but intended to be believed), crossed-fingers (truth optional, but not really intended to be believed), and indeterminate (something akin to Schrödinger's cat).

Scalar values should have only two states: too small to care about and too big to measure (expressible using the sign bit).

Assertions should exist but have no effect when they fall flat.

The switch statement should be recast to perform an operation analogous to a bait-and-switch, perhaps simply ignoring the cases (there only for show) and always performing the default.

And, of course, it should be named "Trump", and the standard library or runtime system should be named "Bannon".

I doubt that attempting to turn this into a working language, one that actually produces compilable code, would be worth the effort, but in the role of prototyping pseudocode it might actually prove to be useful.