As I begin to think about how the graphical output of Poki Nanpa will integrate with its written code, it’s important to consider that there will not be a console to print errors and debugging information to.

The graphical output will take the form of a grid of pixels. This grid could be too small to print long error messages to, so instead it would be good to have a concise way of representing errors graphically. In the Poki Nanpa specification I have begun outlining what this might look like. Take the following example:

Everything here is represented in binary; white or yellow means 0, any other colour means 1. The yellow pixels are just background markers to make it more readable. The red row at the top is a binary representation of the error code. Here it is 90, which in the current draft of the specification corresponds to a syntax error. The next rows represent a stack trace; the error originates in line 13 of import 2, which was called by line 42 of the current file.

The user can also throw their own custom errors if they want, just by inserting [error number] pakala into their code. pakala means “error”, conveniently.

I have also reworked the functions as discussed in my last post. For the prepositions, I’m only allowing tan, tawa, and lon. I want to reserve kepeken and sama because I think I’ll need those for other things.