I am dealing with an old esoteric proprietary language

to save the program one must have the program loaded. Programs are tokenized then saved in a proprietary binary format similar to bytecode.

to load a program, it reverse the bytecode into human readable code.

however, you can ask it to load ASCII for you.

now - you can only run load and save inside the enviroment.

to get a Makefile to work, i had to write a program to compile the code

but when you do LOAD, it also overwrites your entire call stack, so you cannot do

LOAD my_file.txt

SAVE my_file.proprietaryformat

if(err) then { "dump compilation error" }

it will never get there

instead you have to do

LOAD my file; SAVE my file; LOAD $0; goto SOMELABEL;

because they're separated by semicolons they run somehow back to back, and the trick it to load yourself back up and jump to a label that handles the error reporting.

i think i prefer, code that is fairly immutable.