The 99 programming language is a special-purpose language specifically created for the 99 Bottles of Beer web site.
[NOTE: On Sun 2011-08-28 I retroactively changed the author information in all checkins. Nothing nefarious, just cleanup. If you've pulled this repository before, please pull it again.]
99-bottles-of-beer.net is a collection of (as of Sat 2012-09-15) 1500 different programs in different languages, each if which prints the lyrics to the song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall".
When I ran across this site in 2004, I realized that the existing programs were far too verbose, with their loops, subroutines, print statements, and so forth.
So I invented the 99 language.
The language definition is relatively straightforward.
Syntax:
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A 99 program consists of a single text file.
-
On each line, everything from a
#character to the end of the line is ignored, i.e., comments are introduced by#characters. (Unlike some other languages,#characters within character constants and string literals are not an issue.) -
After comments are stripped, leading and trailing white space are ignored.
-
Empty lines are ignored.
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Anything not ignored is a syntax error.
Semantics:
- A syntactically valid 99 program, when executed, prints the lyrics to the song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall".
This distribution includes a 99 interpreter "99", written in Perl 5,
two sample 99 program, 99.99 and empty.99, and a sample output
file, 99.99.out. The interpreter can read its input either
from a file named on the command line, or from standard input if no
arguments are given. The interpreter implements a language extension,
permitting multiple input files to be treated as a single 99 program;
this extension is not supported by the language definition, as no
actual use for it has been discovered.
For your convenience, most systems already include a sample 99 program,
typically called /dev/null (on Unix-like systems), NUL: (CP/M,
MS-DOS and Windows), NIL: (Amiga), NL:, or NLA0: (OpenVMS).
This project was originally hosted on my Roadrunner home page, at http://home.san.rr.com/smov/99/, but Roadrunner decided to delete user home pages without notifying me.
I have received a massive number[*] of requests for a compiler for this language. I will continue to consider such requests for the forseeable future.
References:
- https://github.com/Keith-S-Thompson/99
- http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-99-804.html
- http://esolangs.org/wiki/99
[*] Yes, 1 can be a massive number if you use a big enough font.
-- Keith Thompson Sat 2012-09-15