The only class that I’ve ever truly worried about passing was my compiler design class with Mr. Richard Simpson at Midwestern State University.

While the material was interesting at times, it was almost always several levels over my head and I had a hard time keeping up.

Even though I constantly worried about passing that class, I did have quite a bit of fun with at least one project in that class — Converting the C based interpreter for Mouse into any language of our choice. You can probably guess that I decided to go with PHP 🙂

I’m not sure why I was fond of that language. It was esoteric, hard as hell to understand, and there was almost no chance that I would ever use it for any practical situation.

After all, looking at this sample program below, do you have any idea what’s going on?

[code]
"Enter a positive number that you would like fibonacci numbers up to."

A0=
B1=
C1=

D?="You entered: "D.!"!"
"Fibonacci Sequence: "

(D.C.-^ A.!" "AB.=BC.= CA.B.+=)

A.!" "B.!

"!"

$$
[/code]

But something about it was enjoyable. Which is why I geeked out so hard the other day when I came across an old copy of the Mouse: A Language for Microcomputers.

Now that I’ve got the book, I’m considering creating a JavaScript based interpreter for Mouse.

Until then, here’s a link to the PHP based interpreter of Mouse that I came up with about a year ago.

https://github.com/ebinnion/Mouse-Playground/blob/master/translations/mouse79.php

At this point, the interpreter doesn’t include macros, but should run all of the sample programs in my Mouse repository.