Kaukatcr: an experiment in language design for multi-dimensional spaces

One of the various projects associated with Project Xanadu™[1] was ZigZag™, a kind of organizer system or mind-mapping tool built around twisted multi-dimensional spaces called ZZStructures.

From the beginning, we wanted to make this system scriptable. Some existing internal implementations supported scripting in conventional languages, and Ted wanted a spreadsheet-formula-like language (since he thought of a ZZStructure as a kind of spreadsheet whose rows and columns were set free from their grid and tangled up in arbitrarily expressive ways).

When I was there, Jon Kopetz and I came up with the concept of a language that took more full advantage of the structures available, and I wrote a proof-of-concept implementation. It was not persued further — the language wasn’t really accessible to non-programmers the way a formula system might be, and we had other priorities — but I consider some of the ideas valuable, since, for all its limitations, it sits at the intersection of literate programming, stack programming, and visual programming.

Quick legal note

Project Xanadu produces a lot of code internally — a lot more than ever gets released — and a lot of internal documents and discussions. The code I’m linking to was written independently, from memory, based on things that I wrote for Xanadu. However, it is not officially blessed by the project, so the various trademarks (Project Xanadu™, ZigZag™, the…