Nothing to review

Question

This question claims to implement the Nothing language.

I'm citing the language specification (emphasis mine):

Note: if the output does not meet the expectation of a "hello world"-program, this does not necessarily mean the Nothing program has a bug. The programmer primarily is supposed to contemplate on his expectations, and has to accept that a Nothing program always is bug free.

And:

A Quine is very easy to implement. As a matter of fact, each Nothing program is a Quine by itself. Also all Nothing programs have a palindromic nature.

In my opinion, this language is even more of a joke than lolcode. It's more of a philosophical thing than it is writing code. If all programs are considered bug-free, logic goes right out the window.

Are questions revolving around the Nothing language on-topic?

Answer 1

Yes, with a few exceptions.

I'd say yes, as long as the question isn't actually asking for a review of code written in the language itself.

If the question is asking for review of a Nothing compiler/interpreter, I'd say it's on-topic. There wouldn't be many variations of the compiler implementation though, and chances are I wouldn't vote up a question like this if it had already been implemented in the same language and posted here.

Answer 2

Yes, but...

If you want a review on the code written on the Nothing language, that would be off-topic since the "code" is ... well, nothing! And this would conflict with this section, on the on-topicness (emphasis mine):

Make sure you include your code in your question

This site is for code reviews, which are hard to do when the code is behind a link somewhere out there on the Internet. If you want a code review, you must post the relevant snippets of code in your question. It is fine to post a "see more" link (though, do be careful — very few reviewers will be willing to click through and read thousands of lines of your code), but the most important parts of the code must be placed directly in the question.

_{https://codereview.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic}

Since it is required to have code to review and the code is nothing, it means that there's no code. Since there's no code, it is off-topic to ask for reviews on a Nothing code.

---

If you want a review on a compiler/interpreter, then I see nothing wrong.

The Nothing language has a specification. There's a syntax check. The syntax is an empty file. If the program is invalid (a file with something), it has to provide an error message.

That is a direct interpretation from the Bash implementation:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# A 'Nothing' compiler - RoPe Inc 2010.
#

if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]
then
    echo "Usage: ./nothing <filename.not>"
    exit
fi

if [[ ! -f $1 ]]
then
    echo "File not found!"
    exit
fi

Code=`cat $1`

if [[ -n $Code ]]
then
    echo "Not a valid Nothing source!"
    exit
fi

touch ${1%%.*}
chmod +x ${1%%.*}

echo "Compilation successfull!"

Since there's a standard implementation, we can use this code as a baseline for the functionality of the compiler/interpreter.

With that, I see no problem in posting a question about the compiler/interpreter.