shrub/pub/doc/nock.md

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nock
====

nock is our machine code.

nock is a homoiconic combinator algebra, not much fancier than SKI
combinators. The spec fits on a T-shirt and gzips to 340 bytes.

Think of nock as a kind of functional assembly language. It's not like
assembly language in that it's directly executed by the hardware. It is
like assembly language in that:

-   Everything in Urbit executes as nock.
-   You wouldn't want to program directly in nock.
-   Learning to program directly in nock is a great way to start
    understanding urbit from the ground up.

Just as Unix runs C programs by compiling them to assembler, Urbit runs
Hoon programs by compiling them to nock. You could try to learn Hoon
without learning nock. But just as C is a thin wrapper over the physical
CPU, Hoon is a thin wrapper over the nock virtual machine. It's a tall
stack made of thin layers, which is much easier to learn a layer at a
time.

And unlike most fundamental theories of computing, there's really
nothing smart or interesting about  nock. Of course, in a strictly formal
sense, all of computing is math. But that doesn't mean it needs to feel
like math. nock is a simple mechanical device and it's meant to feel
that way.

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