Programming in Bit

Question

Control flow and tips in Bit

I'm new to Bit, and I'm not sure about how to do certain things like loops, if statements, and other control flow, could someone explain those concepts to me at a beginner level? I'm just starting with the language, so if I could know these and other tips that would be great!

Answer 1

ASCII

First off, you should be familiar with ASCII codes, because Bit uses them a lot when dealing with I/O.

Loops

There is no explicit "loop" command, looping must be done with recursion. For example to turn this pseudocode into Bit, we do this:

Pseudocode:

...

loop 3 times:
    ...

rest of program...

Bit:

BIT 0
... $$ Set value to 48
BYTE i $$ make a var called "i" with value 48
IMPORT var $$ Assuming var is "loop.bit"

loop.bit:

IMPORT i $$ referencing that variable from earlier, because you can do that
ADD 1 i i $$ Add i+1 and set the result to i, aka increment
IMPORT var $$ again, assuming it is "loop.bit"

3:

rest of program...
BYTES 0 $$ MANDATORY, this is invalid so it stops the interpreter with an error
$$ we need this to terminate the loop otherwise the interpreter will hang in an infinite loop
$$ (however, a bug in the interpreter makes this not work, use dividing by 0 or BIT 2 instead. Answers that use BYTES 0 are valid but just won't work on the interpreter)

Import flow

Bit uses IMPORTs to control the program flow, this is inferior to GOTOs and if statements and the like, but it encourages intuitive thinking. So always try to make use of the IMPORT statement.

Golfing

The preferred method of counting bytes in BIT with a multiple file scenario is total source bytes + total bytes of file names excluding the main file