The Nil Programming Language

by Sascha René Leib

Nil constitutes a new paradigm in programming, as it is the world’s first Nihilistic programming language.

Design Goals

Nihilistic output
natural language code
high coolness factor

Current implementations of a Nil compiler have shown that most Nil programms’ object size is significantly smaller than that of most other programming languages.

Restrictions

Preliminary research indicates that Nil might not be the optimal solution for certain non-Nihilistic problems. However, such problems have not yet been discovered in the field.

Syntax

Since natural language input code is allowed, a simple statement can look as follows:

John is stupid.

This declares one Subject (John), one attribute (stupid) and defines the relation between the two of them.

This is, however, not a very useful example yet.

A more sophisticated example of Nil source code:

I wandered lonely as a cloud.

This will compile correctly without any problems and produce the desired object code

Nil compilers have already successfully processed Moby Dick, the Bible and even Finnegans Wake. Without finding much sense in any of these, though.

Compiling

In spite of the sophisticated feature set, implementation of a compiler is almost trivial. Here, in short, the necessary steps for processing:

atomisation: split the source code into atoms – consider every word to be one atom.
translation: convert every atom into the corresponding machine code. Since Nil is a Nihilistic programming language, only the NOP operation opcode is allowed.
optimisation: using only “peephole” optimisation techniques, you will see that multiple NOP opcodes can be replaced by a single one. Therefore, optimisation is extremely efficient.

Outlook

After you got accustomed to the Nihilistic paradigm, you will find that this powerful point of view can solve almost any problem you will ever encounter.

In fact, experience shows that most problem sets, particularly those formulated by our clients, can be handled much better by a nihilistic approach than by any other. By directly inputting client specifications to a Nil compiler, we could improve project turnaround times by no less than 3000%.

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