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Cellang

The system consists of a compiler for the Cellang cellular automata programming language, along with the corresponding documentation, viewer, and various tools. Cellang has been undergoing refinement for the last several years, with corresponding upgrades to the compiler...

The most important distinguishing features of Cellang, include support for:

  • named constants...
  • any number of dimensions
  • compile time specification of each dimension's size
  • cell neighborhoods of any size (though bounded at compile time) and shape
  • positional and time dependent neighborhoods
...

Well, I did ask for a DSL for cellular automata. Here's one...

By Ehud Lamm at 2005-05-11 10:15 | DSL | other blogs | 8551 reads

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Exercise

The exercise is to take this language and implement it using your language of choice (you can play around with the syntax, if you want).

The idea is that we eliminate the language design phase, to see which language is best suited for implementing a small DSL.

I put my money on Scheme (macros) or Haskell (combinators).

By Ehud Lamm at Wed, 2005-05-11 11:26 | login or register to post comments

CA Embedded DSL in Haskell

Here's my take of a simplified EDSL for cellular automata simulations in Haskell. Compare the Cellang version of Life...

sum := [0, 1] + [1, 1] + [1, 0] + [-1, 1] + [-1, 0] + 
       [-1, -1] + [0, -1] + [1, -1]

cell := 1 when (sum = 2 & cell = 1) | sum = 3
      := 0 otherwise

...with...

lsum = at (-1, 1) + at (0, 1) + at (1, 1) +
       at (-1, 0) +             at (1, 0) +
       at (-1,-1) + at (0,-1) + at (1,-1)

life = if_ (lsum .== 2 .&& at (0,0) .== 1 .|| lsum .== 3) 1 0

By Greg Buchholz at Tue, 2006-09-19 19:31 | login or register to post comments

Nice!

Nice!

By Ehud Lamm at Tue, 2006-09-19 20:32 | login or register to post comments

working archive found

The site referenced in the article has long expired. A working link was relayed to me.


http://zooland.alife.org/download/packages/cellang/

By John Eikenberry at Fri, 2006-09-08 15:47 | login or register to post comments

Thanks. I need this

Thanks. I need this link...

I notice nobody posted solutions to my challenge. That's a shame.

By Ehud Lamm at Fri, 2006-09-08 16:15 | login or register to post comments

Invalid file?

I tried downloading the file a couple of times and I seem to always get an error...

$ gzip -d cellular.tar.gz 

gzip: cellular.tar.gz: invalid compressed data--crc error

gzip: cellular.tar.gz: invalid compressed data--length error

By Greg Buchholz at Fri, 2006-09-08 16:55 | login or register to post comments

Another found...

After some digging I found another copy of the archive. It wasn't really in a spot I expect to be around forever so I went ahead and gave it a home. You can find it now at...


http://zhar.net/howto/homeless/cellular/

By John Eikenberry at Sat, 2006-09-09 14:38 | login or register to post comments