Recto – A Truly 2D Language

Re:Recto – A Truly 2D Language by mhagiwara on Friday August 15, 2025 @11:54PM (#44919989)

Hi! Author here. You're right that music and speech carry more than just raw symbols such as intonation, pitch, dynamics, etc. all add important information. But in the framework I'm using, both are still fundamentally “1D” because their core structure unfolds sequentially in time: notes in a score, words and phrases in speech. Even when additional features like accent or dynamics are present, they're layered onto a linear stream.

Recto, by contrast, makes two dimensions part of the syntax itself: elements and rects can expand horizontally or vertically, and they can nest recursively. That's the difference I wanted to highlight.

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Re:Recto – A Truly 2D Language by impulsivepuppet on Saturday August 16, 2025 @05:09AM (#44921618)

I find it quite intriguing to introduce "language-native" matrices and 2d blocks (which I still find difficult to wrap my head around.)

The reason why most people would more intuitively consider a music score as multidimensional has to do with parallelism or concurrency.

In theory, nothing is stopping you from creating a hyperarray language a la BQN++ (or dare I say QRP). Maybe I glossed over an example, but having proper pointwise application to hyperscalars feels like a must-have.

Second idea is to introduce process parallelism, which could actually make this form of syntax into an execution graph of sorts--could be quite promising!

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Re:Recto – A Truly 2D Language by ofalkaed on Saturday August 16, 2025 @05:52AM (#44921838)

Western harmony can not be understood in one dimension, it is very much in two dimensions.

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