Tailor

A string-based esoteric programming language.

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Syntax and Terms
• Frames and Procedures
• Commands
• Installing
• Acknowledgments

Introduction

Tailor is a string-based esoteric programming language. As such, it is not recommended to program anything involving numeric calculations in Tailor. It could be used to program text adventure games, but come on. Do you really think you can code something worthwhile in this? File extensions for Tailor patterns are .tl or .tail. Tailor is forgiving; any errors or unknown commands are handled by skipping over the error like the command that caused the error never existed. Tailor officially recognises the # character as its comment; however, because of the forgiving behavior detailed above, as long as a line doesn't start with a Tailor command it can be treated like a comment.

Syntax and Terms

Tailor introduces some unique syntax for its programs; this is to make the language more esoteric.
Tailor fabrics are the equivalent of variables; they can store one string.
Tailor conditions are the equivalent of Boolean variables; they can store one value which can be true or false.
Tailor patterns are the equivalent of programs.
Tailor procedures are the equivalent of functions.
A Tailor is the person creating a Tailor pattern; this is not to be confused with Tailor itself.

Frames and Procedures

A frame contains all the information in a Tailor pattern. Whenever anything is created in a Tailor pattern, like a fabric or a condition, it is stored in the current frame. When a procedure is called, it creates a new frame whose parent is the previous frame; the arguments the procedure is passed are stored in the new frame as well.

For example, if there is a fabric, foo, and procedure f with argument x is called with foo, then the value of foo is copied out of the current frame and copied into the new frame under the name of x. Values referenced in commands are always checked at the highest level first; in the previous example, if a fabric, x, was present in the outermost frame, the procedure would switch from rewriting the fabric foo that was renamed to x to rewriting the fabric x.

Note that the names of fabrics are never actually changed in a Tailor pattern. During a procedure, fabrics are not actually changed; only their "alias fabrics" are, and the values are copied back after execution.

Commands

In this table, required arguments are shown in bold italic and optional arguments are shown in regular bold.

Name and Usage	Function
gather	Takes input from the user and stores it in fabric materials.
sell	Takes fabric garment, prints it, and clears it.
stop	Halts program execution.
end	Halts execution of current procedure; behaves like stop command if not in a procedure. Does not exit out of while loops.
notch name	Creates a notch with name name that can be used in see commands.
see position	If position is an integer, this command goes to line number position. Otherwise, this command goes to the notch with name position.
hem name	Interprets fabric with name name as Unicode; for example, foo\u2756bar would become foo❖bar.
condition name = fabric flags regex update	Checks if fabric matches regex with flags and creates a new condition, name, with the value of that expression. If update is set, this is updated after each pattern step; otherwise, it is evaluated once and its value is then not changed if the referenced fabric changes. For example, condition foo = checking - /A/ update checks whether fabric checking has any occurrences of the string A in it, and sets condition foo accordingly, updating each pattern step.
condition name = not condition update	Should be self-explanatory.
condition name = fabric 1 == fabric 2 update	Checks if fabric 1 and fabric 2 are equal.
condition name = condition 1 operation condition 2 update	Should be self-explanatory. Supported operations are and, or, and xor.
if ( condition ){	Checks if condition is true and executes code block accordingly. The parentheses are optional.
while ( condition ){	Loops while condition is true. The parentheses are optional.
bleach fabric	Strips fabric of any ANSI color codes.
dye fabric color	If color is an integer, this command colors fabric with the corresponding ANSI color code. Otherwise, the color code used is the value of the fabric color. In this case, if color is not a valid fabric or the value of color is not an integer, the color code used is 255 instead.
embroider fabric flags string	Writes string to fabric. Supported flags are a and p, which respectively append and prepend string to fabric instead of overwriting it. In case of -ap, both are applied and fabric is "wrapped" with string.
copy fabric 1 flags regex fabric 2	Copies the parts of fabric 1 that match regex with flags to fabric 2. The a and p flags mentioned before can also additionally be set. Note that flags and regex come as a set; either both flags and regex are included or neither are.
type name = contents	Creates a new type with name name and contents contents. For example, type vowels = ["a","e","i","o","u"] creates a new type named vowels with the contents "a","e","i","o","u". ALWAYS use double quotes.
type name = type 1 + type 2	Creates a new type with name name and with contents equal to type 1 prepended to type 2. Using the previous example, type vowelY = vowels + ["y"] creates a new type with the contents "a","e","i","o","u","y", and type foo = vowels + vowelY creates a new type with the contents "a","e","i","o","u","y","a","e","i","o","u"
replace fabric flags type 1 type 2	Goes through fabric and replaces all occurrences of a character from type 1 with the corresponding character from type 2. Supported flags are a,p, and g. g is the global flag; without it, only the first occurrence is replaced.
alter fabric flags regex replace	Finds all occurrences of regex with flags in fabric and replaces them with string replace. If both flags and regex are empty, this command acts like embroider fabric replace. Supported flags are a,p, and g.
procedure name ( arguments ){	Creates a new procedure, name, with arguments whose code is the code block after this command.
do name ( arguments )	Does procedure name with arguments.
variation path	Imports a file with relative path path , running it and copying its functions. For example, variation examples/reversing.tail would create the functions reversing.shunt and reversing.reverse, also executing any additional code.

Installing

Clone this repository or download tailor.py directly.

Either run using Python (version 3):

python3 tailor.py <pattern.tail>

Or, ensure that the file is executable and in your PATH:

tailor.py <pattern.tail>

Acknowledgments

Many thanks go out to LyricLy for showing me how to do regular expressions in Python and general help, and to tripodsan for general code debugging.