Shakespeare Programming Language

Literate Literary Programming

Shakespeare Programming Language (SPL) is an esoteric language designed with the goal of making its source code look like William Shakespeare’s plays.

History

SPL was designed by Karl Wiberg and Jon Åslund in 2001. The documentation they made for it then is still on the Internet. The specification came with a reference implementation, an SPL-to-C source-to-source compiler. Over the years, other implementations have been made:

• Lingua::Shakespeare in Perl
• Spl, an SPL-to-C compiler in Python
• horatio, an interpreter in Javascript
• Probably others

I thought that the language was fun, but found it very frustrating to use these compilers/interpreters because of the lack of immediate and helpful feedback when things went wrong. SPL is a language designed to be almost impossible to write, and searching for errors by making incremental changes to a program makes it that much worse. For these reasons, I created my own implementation:

• shakespearelang, an interpreter in Python with a console and debugger

Get Started

First, install the package from PyPI. It is called shakespearelang.

Then, create a new file called first_program.spl with this text:

A New Beginning.

Hamlet, a literary/storage device.
Juliet, an orator.

                    Act I: The Only Act.

                    Scene I: The Prince's Speech.

[Enter Hamlet and Juliet]

Juliet: Thou art the sum of an amazing healthy honest noble peaceful fine Lord
        and a lovely sweet golden summer's day. Speak your mind!

        Thou art the sum of thyself and a King. Speak your mind!

[Exeunt]

On the command line:

$ shakespeare run first_program.spl
HI

You just ran your first SPL program!

More coming soon…