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explained Q-forms in the readme

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2026-07-04 17:10:08 +03:00
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README.md
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Clyx (pronounced like _clicks_) is a concatenative, stack-oriented, interpreted programming language designed for simplicity, minimalism, and metaprogramming capabilities.
Clyx aims for maximum portability and can be implemented in any modern runtime environment that supports data structures defined in JSON (numbers, strings, lists and key-value dictionaries). Extra features varying in portability include filesystem support and TCP socket I/O.
Clyx aims for maximum portability and can be implemented in any modern runtime environment that supports data structures defined in JSON (numbers, strings, arrays and key-value dictionaries). Extra features varying in portability include filesystem support and TCP socket I/O.
The core spec of Clyx is mostly stable but the standard library is still a work-in-progress.
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While diverging from some "purity" aspects, Clyx is a decent choice for newcomers that want to try out a totally new programming paradigm without investing too much time into fighting the language's quirks.
### Why are lists called Q-forms in Clyx?
Idiomatically, lists (as a data structure, as in Python lists or JSON arrays) can only hold data. Q-form is short for "quotation form", which just means that it is a quoted (block-like) sequence that can be treated both as data and as code. Physically, Q-forms are implemented as random-access lists or arrays in 100% cases, but logically, it's important to maintain this distinction that Q-forms can hold program code and lists in general do not. Besides, the term "list" is confusing in general because, apart from the random access lists used to implement Q-forms, it can also refer to linked lists or double-linked lists, which have totally different sets of features and constraints.
### What do I need to do to create my own Clyx implementation?
Just port the core interpreter along with the 50 primitive words, stubbing out the words that cannot be supported by the target platform if there are any, so that if a program that e.g. uses `nopen` runs on a non-networked host environment, then the user would get a clear message that an unsupported core primitive word has been encountered and the program has been terminated because of that.