You can see all the current Sunweaver commands here:
commands. Note that's a pretty short list. I'll probably add cos to it, but otherwise it's pretty close to a final draft.
For .sx and .dx, they're abbreviations from Italian (sinastra is left, destra is right). Because the original author of Darwinbots is from Italy. If you don't speak Italian that's pretty confusing. But if you speak Italian it makes sense (presumably
). Ah you say, that's your point. But we can't make it not confusing to everyone. If everything was in plain English that isn't going to help the guy that speaks Japanese. They might know English well enough for most things but I'm sure they don't know the word for venom or reproduction off the top of their head. Ah, but what if we just add all the japenese words/characteres for things in there too? We could do something like:
5 .毒を作る
But now if you come across a bot that looks like that as an English speaker you're going to have to go look stuff up. I certainly don't speak Japanese. So it doesn't help reading other people's bots.
Ah you say, but it's the bot writing that I want to make easier. But trying to make the language suit itself to everyone is an impossible challenge. Ask 10 different people what their ideal language would look like and you'll get back 12 different answers. By accepting that some things are going to be a little shitty for everyone we can at least work towards making the single way of doing things less shitty.
Is there an American bias going on here? Yes, absolutely. I happen to be American. But most programming languages have an American bias. Not even just an English one, but an
American one. That's why it's "color" and not "colour" in HTML. Would HTML be better if it supported "colour" too? But then why stop there? Why not support all languages. Why not 色 and রঙ?
I don't mean that as a rhetorical straw man argument, either. The current computing landscape is so dominated by an American way of thinking (and not just American, but a West Coast way of thinking) that it's entirely possible that there's a thought monoculture going on and all sorts of interesting solutions to problems are simply never created because we're so locked in to thinking of problems in one specific way.
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and all that.
But I'm not going to solve the problem of cultural American imperialism. I just don't have the time or nrg (
). So I'm going to apologize upfront for any cultural imperialism I bring with me to the table, and defend myself by simply saying that it's the way things are (in the world at large). Things
could be in Japanese. Or British English. Or Swahili. But trying to do all at once is too much. An arbitrary choice has to be made, so I made it. And it's a pretty defensible choice because I can point to all the other American English dominated computer languages out there. Which is itself indefensible cultural imperialism. But there you go.
...
Now rant aside, you can make your own sysvars aliases in DB2 already, and if you haven't you should look in to it. See
def. You can't make your own commands in DB2, but try playing with it and see if you can articulate what you don't like about it. If it's that you have to copy+paste it in to every new bot, we can look at #include/Import for Sunweaver. If it's that you don't want to have to write it the first time, I'll write you one to get started. But I'm not you and I don't know how you think, so the probability that it's going to be something you like is vanishingly small. If it's something else, let me know.
You should also try playing around with the new language, because while it's superficially similar there's enough differences to make things... different
. There's the (old) command line interpreter stickied which you've already posted in so I'm sure you've found it. I can also try and get Panda's IDE as a distributable and you can try writing DNA in that (no way to "execute" it at present, but it'll tell you about syntax errors). If there's specific usability problems you have in Sunweaver I'll try to think them over and fix them. I'm assuming at the least you're comfortable with the bool and int stack concepts from DB2? And about reverse polish notation?