[stack] Concatenative scripting language in Bitcoin
Chris Double <[email protected]> Sat, 31 Dec 2011 14:23:04 +1300
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.lang.concatenative |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <CALn1vHFX9y6KgMbODF+Fw_H7KjTrTKdZSTb1scw_=13JyCHXgw@mail.gmail.com> |
I thought this might interest some concatenative people. The virtual currency Bitcoin has a stack based scripting language built in for creating transactions. The intent was to allow extending the types of transactions (other than just "send money to address X") via scripting to allow various types of contracts, escrow, etc. Some information on the language is here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script Recently there has been discussion on adding an 'eval' feature that allows popping a program off the stack and executing it. This is similar to concatenative languages like Joy. the general proposal is here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0012 This has raised some discussion on the bitcoin development mailing list about whether this gives the scripting language too much power. Can it now be used to create loops or otherwise work around some of the existing languages constraints and subvert the bitcoin transaction system. Discussion is on this mailing list post: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=28602033 This is an interesting example of stack based languages in real world systems. Chris. -- http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz