Linda was already taken.
--the reason I chose Magenta as the name of the language

The Magenta Home Page

The only programming language with a curse

This is designed to be the most redundant programming language in existence. It has over eighty reserved words, a needlessly convoluted exception system, a threading system that looks entirely too much like a really weird function call syntax, a function call syntax that happens to be really weird, and a curse. In short, a perfect designed-by-committee language.

Magenta was created by committee, in fact, from a proposal thrown out on the Usenet newsgroup alt.folkore.computers in 1995. If it resembles anything, it looks like Java with Ada pretensions with a touch of smoked Smalltalk. It's been a while, so I can't say where any of the participants are now, but if any one of you sees this, let me know so I can thank you properly (with a Bronx cheer and a whack over the head with a cluebyfour, of course).

1999 Update Truthfully? I look back on this whole mess now and think several things:

First, I don't have a damn clue what any of this means anymore. The design was such a twisted mess that there was no way I could go back and add anymore to it. I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the poor sap trying to turn this disaster into a LALR(1) grammar for yacc. That said, I'd love to see someone try.
Second, Magenta was based loosely on Ada, thus the name. (To those who weren't there, the original plan was to call it Linda, after the Lovelace that Sucked. Unfortunately, Linda was taken twice over (ironically enough, by what appears to be a couple of fairly small languages). Therefore, the second choice: Ada was originally known as Green when it was being crufted together in 1979. The opposite of Green is Magenta, as anyone who's ever seen a color wheel will tell you. Therefore...) Unfortunately, that predated the arrival of Java and the meteoric rise of Perl, both of which have a zillion features that I would love to have seen in Magenta. I went back and tried to add it (the scraps of at least two separate projects, both named Dominatrix, lie dead around my several computers, and parts of them have crawled, half-dead, into the supplement manual), but, as mentioned above, none of it made any sense anymore. And there you have it.
Third, I'm perversely proud of this thing anyway. I got to be in charge of something without bollixing it up or giving it up too early, and that's saying a lot for an ADDer.

I wouldn't mind Magenta becoming something. I foresee MS Visual Magenta 2002. egcs-Magenta. And lots and lots of bear food (see the reference manual for details). But right now, it's just what's here.

Right now I don't have much. What you see here is the reference manual, a way to submit ideas, and an explanation of the curse. Have fun.

You can click this to read the Annotated Reference Manual and find out what I was smoking when I wrote some of this stuff. This is really where you want to start, since it provides a much better-organized sample of the language while still leaving the core information largely unchanged.

Click here to see Magenta in all its original sick glory, as posted on Usenet so many years ago. (FYI, this file is plain text, primarily because the HTML markup would be an absolute bitch. I know because I did it all for the above file.)

And finally, you can click here to find out some of the features that never quite made it into the spec. This is probably more interesting than the original spec...

As far as I'm concerned, you can do what you want with Magenta, if you have the nerve to try and do it. Nobody touched it when it first showed up, so I think it's safe to say nobody will, but hey...

I may, at some point, throw this whole mess up on afc again. Also, anyone who might have archived the original afc messages, contact me. I'd love to have some history behind it available. I also wouldn't mind someone coming up with an updated reference manual, or a compiler, or something of the like; contact me if you're interested in bringing this back from the dead.

Warning: The Curse

It appears that Magenta carries a curse. While I was trying to write this page, we had a power blink here in my dorm and I lost the page. The network connection out of the dorm blew up and still wasn't working when I finished this page.

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