Introducing Stck

Stck is a stack based esoteric programming language. You can check out and use stck at stck.jakerunzer.com, or find the source on Github.

In Stck, the only data structures are global stacks. Stacks are identified using a sequence of alpha characters.

# this is a comment!

1>a # push 1 onto stack a
a>  # pop from a
a>b # pop from a and push to b

The stacks o and i are used to output to standard out and take input from standard in, respectively.

There are two types of primitives in Stck: strings and numbers.

"hello">a
1>b

In addition to pushing and popping, you can also manipulate the stacks with operators. Currently, there are four mathematical operators: +, -, *, /. The syntax is

stack+operand or stack+stack or stack+

For example,

• a+b: Pop from a and b, perform addition, push the result to a.
• a+: Pop two values from a, perform addition, push the result to a.
• a+4: Pop from a, perform addition with the literal 4, push the result to a.

There is also the clear operator, ?. a? will clear the stack if the topmost value is 0.

Additionally, there are loops and functions.

# create function
{:foo
  # function body
}

:foo # call function foo

(n
  # loop until stack n is empty
)

Motivation

Stck was created because there was a period of time where I was really into esolangs and wanted to contribute to that world. Exploring programming language concepts and design is super interesting. I had never used or created a stack based language, so I thought that was a good place to start. I will definitely be creating another esolang in the future, although probably not a stack based one.