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The Beginnings
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Almost three years ago, when I was a student at the
HTBLA Steyr (which is a technical school) in
the department for electronics and computer science, I began to write a text editor called
HC. After a couple of weeks it had the basic functionalities (which means, it could be used
for editing text files, not very much more).
At this time I thought it would be nice to add a macro language in the future, and I decided
to call this language RUSL. There was no language definition, I didn't even
had any idea how this language could look like. I abandoned the HC - project a few weeks
later. Unfortunately I didn't save any code of it (It was all on the servers of the HTBLA,
and I'm sure it's deleted now).
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The need for an Interpreter
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In Oktober 1999 I had to do the "community service" as a paramedic at the
austrian Red Cross. In my free time i started to write a script interpreter, using bison
and flex. I called it RUSL, but it had nothing to do with RUSL in it's current form.
I discussed the language and the implementation of the interpreter with Rene, and we decided
to work on it together.
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RUSL in XML
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At 10-24-2000 Rene had the idea to use xml as source file format for RUSL. He wrote an example
code how it could look like:
 <class name="myclass" extends="abstractclass"
implements="otherclass">
<variable type="$int" name="i" value="10"/>
<function name="test" returntype="$int" modifiere="$public">
<return ${i}>
</function>
<function name="main" modifiere="$static, $public">
<call name="test"/>
</function>
</class>
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In the same email he said that he thinks it would be to much effort to write RUSL - code,
and I should forget that idea with xml. I did not.
We then decided to write a whole language definition, where the keywords of the language
would be in xml, and the rest of the code as text within the tags. RUSL as it is now was born.
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The name Platypus.
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In one of our discussions about RUSL, the philosophy of programming, life, the universe and
everything, Rene and I decided to search a name for the RUSL - interpreter we write. We didn't
want to call it just RUSL, to make it possible, that others write RUSL - interpreters too.
We first thought that "dragonfly" would be a cool name, but then we realized that dragonflys
are bugs... Not a very good association for a software product.
We had to search another name, and we wanted to have a name of an animal. After I drank some
beers and guinness's Rene suddenly said: "A duck billed platypus is a cool animal".
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Platypus and sourceforge
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As Rene worked in vienna at this time and we just met on weekends, we needed an electronic
communication aid. Email was not the best, because it is not very clear when you have to
see the history of a discussion too. On 12-04-2000 Rene and I decided to register Platypus
RUSL at sourceforge.
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