[entaloneralie]

This is amazing! I love seeing FRACTRAN-shaped things on the homepage :) This reminds me of how 1-bit stacks are encoded in binary:

A stack of zeros and ones can be encoded in a single number by keeping with bit-shifting and incrementing.

    Pushing a 0 onto the stack is equivalent to doubling the number.
    Pushing a 1 is equivalent to doubling and adding 1.
    Popping is equivalent to dividing by 2, where the remainder is the number.

I use something not too far off for my daily a programming based on a similar idea:

Rejoice is a concatenative programming language in which data is encoded as multisets that compose by multiplication. Think Fractran, without the rule-searching, or Forth without a stack.

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/rejoice

[gowld]

Have I got news for you!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitwise_operation#Bit_shifts

[SeanSullivan86]

Wouldn't you also need to keep track of the stack's size, to know if there are leading zeros?

[entaloneralie]

For trailing zeros yeah, or if you care for stack overflow/underflow. Here's a few primitives if you wanna try it out:

https://paste.sr.ht/~rabbits/cd2369cc7c72bfad0fcd83e27682095...

[StilesCrisis]

Did you just explain base-2 numbers on the HN forums as if it were novel?

[entaloneralie]

I never claimed it was novel, chill.

[lioeters]

You missed the part where the number is being used as a 1-bit stack. They never claimed novelty, it's just a neat technique that might be unfamiliar to most people.

[nyeah]

It's dry humor?

[mackeye]

adding a zero to the left of a binary integer doesn't double it