Iota and Jot
![]() | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. (February 2011) |
Iota and its successor Jot (from Greek iota, Hebrew yodh, the smallest letters in those two alphabets) are extremely minimalist formal systems, designed to be even simpler than other more popular alternatives, such as the lambda calculus and SKI combinator calculus. They can therefore also be considered minimalist computer programming languages, or Turing tarpits, esoteric programming languages that are designed to be as small as possible but still Turing-complete. Both systems use only two symbols and involve only two operations. Zot is a successor to Iota that includes input and output.[1]
Iota's universal combinator has a very simple structure (defined here using denotational semantics in terms of the lambda calculus):
From this, one can recover the usual SKI basis combinators as follows:
Because of its minimalism, it has influenced research concerning Chaitin's constant.[2]
Iota
Iota is the LL(1) Polish notation of trees of the aforementioned combinator leafs consed by function application
iota = "U" | "$" iota iota
so that for example denotes , whereas denotes .
Jot
Jot is a regular language
jot = "" | jot "0" | jot "1"
where the denote whereas the denote and the reduce to .
Zot
See also
References
- ^ Barker, Chris. "Zot". The Esoteric Programming Languages Webring. Archived from the original on 12 March 2016. Retrieved 4 October 2016.
- ^ Stay, Michael (August 2005). "Very Simple Chaitin Machines for Concrete AIT". Fundamenta Informaticae. 68 (3). IOS Press: 231–247. Retrieved 20 February 2011.
External links
- Barker, Chris. "Iota and Jot: the simplest languages?". The Esoteric Programming Languages Webring. Archived from the original on 7 May 2016. Retrieved 13 August 2004.
- https://esolangs.org/wiki/Iota
- https://esolangs.org/wiki/Jot
- https://esolangs.org/wiki/Zot