Devlog 22 Indexes
December 17, 2022
Log 22
Before I continue with the interpreter, I want to review an idea I had about indexing words.
Indexes
In devlog 10 I mentioned removing indexes because they’re not necessary, but I think it’s such a cool feature that I decided I’ll give it a shot just for fun.
The idea is instead of linking a word to the previously defined word in the dictionary, using HERE and LATEST, we would link it to the latest word of the same length… something like LATEST5 for a word with 5 characters, or LATEST17 for a word with 17 characters. We would also keep track with HERE5 or HERE17. In total we would need to dedicate 64 CELLs for indexes (one HERE and one LATEST for each character length: 1 to 32, total 256 Bytes) because we’re limited to only 32 characters for a word’s length (5 bits). We would continue to update HERE and LATEST as usual, to make it easy to unhide a word in SEMI, but the linking part would keep all words of the same length together.
Essentially, the indexes would be a new feature to make lookups quicker than the current O(N) dictionary word lookup. Another added benefit is in the future it would make removing a word much easier, since we wouldn’t need to wipe a huge chunk of the dictionary just to remove 1 word. It would be a somewhat simple matter of relinking the words of the same length, which might only be between 1 and 10 words (instead of possibly hundreds, depending on the size of the dictionary). All of this can easily be automated into a simple forget function or something like that.
I realize this is probably an unnecessary optimization when the dictionary only contains a few words, but it seems like an interesting challenge that I could totally implement given a few hours of focus time.
Closing thoughts
Yes I know, I didn’t write any new code, I just wanted to flesh out an idea before I forget it haha.
In the next session I’ll continue with the interpreter and then jump over to implement the indexes feature before coming back to the interpreter’s lookup function.