CosmicOS

Last updated

CosmicOS is a self-contained message designed to be understood primarily by treating it as a computer program and executing it. It is inspired by Hans Freudenthal's Lincos and resembles the programming language Scheme in many ways.

Contents

The message is written with only four basic symbols representing the binary digits one and zero and open and close brackets. Numbers are represented as a string of binary digits between a pair of brackets and expressions are represented as a string of numbers between brackets. Identifiers for operations are arbitrarily assigned numbers and their functions can be defined within the message itself.

Self-contained messages are of interest for CETI research, but there is much difference of opinion over the most appropriate encoding and broadcast medium to use. CosmicOS is released in modular form, so that the basic message can be adapted to a particular concrete instantiation. The message is released under the GPL licence. [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communication. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented as either "1" or "0", but other representations such as true/false, yes/no, on/off, or +/ are also widely used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Binary-coded decimal</span> System of digitally encoding numbers

In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight. Sometimes, special bit patterns are used for a sign or other indications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital data</span> Discrete, discontinuous representation of information

Digital data, in information theory and information systems, is information represented as a string of discrete symbols, each of which can take on one of only a finite number of values from some alphabet, such as letters or digits. An example is a text document, which consists of a string of alphanumeric characters. The most common form of digital data in modern information systems is binary data, which is represented by a string of binary digits (bits) each of which can have one of two values, either 0 or 1.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Floating-point arithmetic</span> Computer approximation for real numbers

In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some base, called a significand, scaled by an integer exponent of that base. Numbers of this form are called floating-point numbers.

Hexadecimal is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of sixteen. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using ten symbols, hexadecimal uses sixteen distinct symbols, most often the symbols "0"–"9" to represent values 0 to 9 and "A"–"F" to represent values from ten to fifteen.

In computer science, an integer is a datum of integral data type, a data type that represents some range of mathematical integers. Integral data types may be of different sizes and may or may not be allowed to contain negative values. Integers are commonly represented in a computer as a group of binary digits (bits). The size of the grouping varies so the set of integer sizes available varies between different types of computers. Computer hardware nearly always provides a way to represent a processor register or memory address as an integer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Smalltalk</span> Object-oriented programming language released first in 1972

Smalltalk is a purely object oriented programming language (OOP) that was originally created in the 1970s for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, but later found use in business. It was created at Xerox PARC by Learning Research Group (LRG) scientists, including Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, and Scott Wallace.

A computer number format is the internal representation of numeric values in digital device hardware and software, such as in programmable computers and calculators. Numerical values are stored as groupings of bits, such as bytes and words. The encoding between numerical values and bit patterns is chosen for convenience of the operation of the computer; the encoding used by the computer's instruction set generally requires conversion for external use, such as for printing and display. Different types of processors may have different internal representations of numerical values and different conventions are used for integer and real numbers. Most calculations are carried out with number formats that fit into a processor register, but some software systems allow representation of arbitrarily large numbers using multiple words of memory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PureBasic</span>

PureBasic is a commercially distributed procedural computer programming language and integrated development environment based on BASIC and developed by Fantaisie Software for Windows, Linux, and macOS. An Amiga version is available, although it has been discontinued and some parts of it are released as open-source. The first public release of PureBasic for Windows was on 17 December 2000. It has been continually updated ever since.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atari BASIC</span> Dialect of the BASIC programming language

Atari BASIC is an interpreter for the BASIC programming language that shipped with Atari 8-bit computers. Unlike most American BASICs of the home computer era, Atari BASIC is not a derivative of Microsoft BASIC and differs in significant ways. It includes keywords for Atari-specific features and lacks support for string arrays.

Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer.

In computer programming, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that transforms binary data into a sequence of printable characters, limited to a set of 64 unique characters. More specifically, the source binary data is taken 6 bits at a time, then this group of 6 bits is mapped to one of 64 unique characters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Binary code</span> Encoding for data, using 0s and 1s

A binary code represents text, computer processor instructions, or any other data using a two-symbol system. The two-symbol system used is often "0" and "1" from the binary number system. The binary code assigns a pattern of binary digits, also known as bits, to each character, instruction, etc. For example, a binary string of eight bits can represent any of 256 possible values and can, therefore, represent a wide variety of different items.

A binary number is a number expressed in the base-2 numeral system or binary numeral system, a method for representing numbers that uses only two symbols for the natural numbers: typically "0" (zero) and "1" (one). A binary number may also refer to a rational number that has a finite representation in the binary numeral system, that is, the quotient of an integer by a power of two.

Quaternary is a numeral system with four as its base. It uses the digits 0, 1, 2, and 3 to represent any real number. Conversion from binary is straightforward.

Hexspeak is a novelty form of variant English spelling using the hexadecimal digits. Created by programmers as memorable magic numbers, hexspeak words can serve as a clear and unique identifier with which to mark memory or data.

Dot-decimal notation is a presentation format for numerical data. It consists of a string of decimal numbers, using the full stop (dot) as a separation character.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FutureBASIC</span>

FutureBasic is a free BASIC compiler for Apple Inc.'s Macintosh.

Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXTSTEP operating system. Due to Apple macOS’s direct lineage from NeXTSTEP, Objective-C was the standard language used, supported, and promoted by Apple for developing macOS and iOS applications from 1997, when Apple purchased NeXT until the introduction of the Swift language in 2014.

Swift is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language created by Chris Lattner in 2010 for Apple Inc. and maintained by the open-source community. Swift compiles to machine code and uses an LLVM-based compiler. Swift was first released in June 2014 and the Swift toolchain has shipped in Xcode since Xcode version 6, released in September 2014.

References

  1. "CosmicOS". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-05-21.