Its been 4 designs trashed since I've got this need to write a Markdown to HTML convertor in Factor. The catch: I don't want to use regular expressions. I'm trying to make it really generic but some stupid edge case comes along and crashes the parser. Talk about morale sapping. Particularly when I'm already quite frustrated. This is the only frustration which I can rant about in public.

Hey the name's KodeClutz, I had to be precise. 4 papers down, 3 to go, after which I'm one step closer to freedom, and quite a major step because all the exams after that are just one day affairs, 4 of them. In going stupid, I'm thinking of writing a Markdown parser in Factor. The problem isn't Factor, I'm just not that well qualified. But I might just do it.

Before beginning, I must admit I haven't messed with Factor for a couple of weeks now, nor do I contribute to it, I'm a Factor n00b. Please contradict peacefully. Of course there are the usual reasons that it is open source, most of the standard libraries are in Factor itself, and that it has a really cool development environment. But almost every popular language these days has all that stuff.

Not much posts here, and nothing of interest. Well there really isn't much I've been doing. I hacked a brainf**k interpreter in Factor, but since I've no time for Turing tarpits, someone should test it on more complex programs. Besides the number to string conversion does cause output problems. I also have a refresh ready for my website, but it isn't going online any time soon, because its not for 22bits, but a new one, which I might do after a few months.

My first useful factor program. ! A guessing game USING: calendar random strings namespaces prettyprint math.parser io io.files math kernel combinators ; IN: guess ! lets choose our number SYMBOL: answer ! initialize the generator now timestampunix-time init-random ! get a number [1..100] and put it in answer 100 random answer set answer get . ! keep asking the user : start-guessing ( -- ) "Enter number: " print

Its been a week since i discovered Factor. So first, it's stack based, it's small, it's almost tiny. I've never programmed in a stack based language before. But I liked it, really makes you think. Infact I haven't got any program written yet, just playing around in the interactive interpreter. It's got really good documentation by way of the API, what it could use is a quick start guide, ie.