var'aq-related links

There's plenty of material out there that would be relevant to var'aq; it's just that all of it feeds into what I used to create it and very little of it has anything to do with var'aq itself. This links page is therefore sort of a tour of my inspirations in creating var'aq. Sit back, relax, grab a beer or a cup of coffee and start clicking.

Creative

This is the sort of thing where I mention the influences that led to the creation of var'aq in the first place. This is basically the usual suspects that you'd expect, and a few more.

Literary

var'aq, of course, inhabits the Star Trek universe. I needn't go into detail here; if you don't know, you probably wouldn't be interested in this project in the first place.

• Star Trek. You need know no more than this, though I should mention that I don't go to this website very much at all.
• The Klingon Language Institute, the home of all things Klingon. They don't know about this yet, but they will eventually, especially inasmuch as I used their site quite extensively to come up with Klingon computer terminology. Mark Shoulson, KLI member, is one of the coauthors and our head linguistic consultant.

Cyberlinguistic

This project has allowed me to indulge a long hobby of mine, language design. I've created ideas for both natural and computer languages; the following pages point to some of my influences in the creation of var'aq. Some are straight, some are strange, all are quite interesting.

• The Turing Tarpit -- A blatant, shameless plug, but this is where my love of computer languages got its first big exposure. It is one of the first pages devoted to programming language oddities out there.
• Cat's Eye Technologies -- Chris Pressey, proprietor of Cat's Eye, is one of var'aq's coauthors and may be one of the few people outside academia stretching the boundaries in programming language design today.
• Adobe PostScript -- To those of you who have never actually tried to figure out the print process, PostScript is just a name on the side of the printer. To anyone who's ever actually looked at a .ps file, PostScript is a fairly hairy-looking computer language whose closest major cousins are Forth and the HP-48 graphing calculator. PostScript is actually a fairly well-designed functional programming language with an RPN syntax and var'aq very strongly resembles it (more because of the structure of the Klingon language than anything else). Check it out; a lot of the var'aq docs are based on the format Adobe uses in the PostScript definition anyway so it might be helpful just so you can understand the notation.
• Lisp -- This, I suppose, is one of many sites I could have linked to. Lisp is the oldest high-level computer language still in use, and it's best known for the prefix syntax and hideously omnipresent parentheses that gave it the expansion "Lotsa Irritating Superfluous Parentheses" (as opposed to the proper "List Processing"). Though it has no such features now, var'aq is destined to handle composite data structures as lists (though differently from Lisp).