Introduction

What is this?

These are unofficial companion pages for learning the array based programming language Uiua. I'm doing this for myself but I'm hoping it can help others too.

I will be going through the official documentation, chapter by chapter, solving and explaining the challenges as best as I can.

If you spot any errors, mistakes or misconceptions then don't hesitate to send in corrections to [email protected]. They are very welcome. Feel free to email improvements as well.

Who is this for?

This is intended for people who have a hard time with the documentation challenges. I think the Uiua documentation is exemplary, and I will be linking it in each chapter, but I did struggle a lot going through the problems. Personally, I need things dumbed down quite a bit and it didn't help that I had no prior experience with array based languages.

For the reader, I assume no experience with array languages nor of Uiua. I do however assume that you will read through each official Uiua tutorial chapter, try the challenges and then come back here if there is something you don't understand.

What is Uiua anyway?

Uiua (wee-wuh) is a general purpose array-oriented programming language with a focus on simplicity, beauty, and tacit code.

uiua.org

Uiua looks like this

⍥◡+9∩1

Wowee, that is a confusing series of glyphs, yet they compute the first 9 terms of the Fibonacci sequence. Do not worry if this looks like garbled nonsense, this will become readable once you engage with it enough.

But what about typing these glyphs?

When writing Uiua you don't have to remember unicode sequences or set up a keyboard layer for all these glyphs. Nobody is stopping you though.

Instead, when using the Uiua repl or the pad, certain keywords will be formatted into their corresponding glyphs. I recommend the uiua pad.

Exercise 1

In the pad, write repeat below add 9 both 1 and then run your program. It should format to be the same as the main example above and then output the Fibonacci sequence.

repeat below add 9 both 1

becomes

⍥◡+9∩1

which outputs

[1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34]

What's next?

Go to the next chapter. On the top of every page I link to the relevant Uiua documentation. Read that first, try the challenges. Then come back to check your understanding, if necessary.

On Uiua Syntax highlighting

Uiua is very cool and will syntax highlight macros and bound functions differently depending on their context.

Monadic functions are yellow, function modifiers are yellow and dyadic are blue, literals are red.

I'm colour blind, these might be green, purple and orange. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I am using Zola to generate this site and I've chosen to sacrifice bound function and macro accuracy in favour of having an easier time writing code.

Zola utilizes Giallo for syntax highlighting which, as of writing, does not support Uiua so I've clobbered together this horror.