For folks who want to learn more, the "Green Book" _PostScript Language Program Design_ is a classic:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3883749-postscript-langu...

and _Thinking in PostScript_ was made available from the author's site and is widely available as a PDF:

https://w3-o.cs.hm.edu/users/ruckert/public_html/compiler/Th...

For a more typical usage see:

https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/manual/

(I used to do PostScript programming on my NeXT Cube for custom fills and strokes in Altsys Virtuoso)

Nice work! Interesting convention on naming procedures. I'm not sure I could deal with the verbosity, but it is probably a good idea for bigger programs.

I've written neural network (ConvNet) in PostScript and this post has inspired me to finish it up and publish a blog post this week.

ZMachine in PS:

      gs -dNOSAFER zmachine.ps -- game.z3

 http://zzo38computer.org/zmachine/interp/zmachine.ps

PostScript is deep magic that I admire from a distance.

This is some mad scientist stuff. Great work.

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A nice showcase of Postscript's abilities, which I first became aware of around 1990, when I sent a tiny program to a Postscript printer to generate a 1024x1024 maze, taking half a day to finish. The graphics are simple but good looking. The engine is weak as expected for a tiny engine. The game I played with my first 4 moves of e2e4, d2d4, e4e5, and d4d5 resulted in checkmate on move 18. I wasn't sure if it would accept en-passant capture but it did. Other tiny engines like Micro-Max [1] and nanochess [2] are much stronger. An interesting long running (2009-2021) discussion between their authors may be found on the chess programming forum [3].

[1] https://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/max-src2.html

[2] https://nanochess.org/chess3.html

[3] http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=26622

> PostScript is deep magic

Why do you say that? It's a very simple and tiny language that you can learn in an afternoon. Far from the utter complexity of modern things. It's barely more complicated than a programmable calculator. Certainly simpler, cleaner, and arguably more powerful than svg graphics.

You don't even need to read any manual to guess what this example program does:

   100 100 moveto 
   200 300 lineto
   stroke

    ... $   cat tiger.ps | netcat 192.168.0.78 9100

If you want an accessible introduction to postscript that does a bunch of very pretty pictures you can't go wrong with: https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~cass/graphics/text/www/

I particularly like chapter 14 where you implement 3d shader in postscript.

I've done a bit of PostScript programming in the dim and distant past - the most ambitious of which was a "pretty-printer" for the YAM email client on Amiga, which otherwise just printed emails as plain ASCII.

I found PostScript to be one of those things where something "clicks" after a while, and I really started to appreciate the elegance and simplicity. The hardest part is the mental gymnastics required to track what's on the stack and in what order!

It's not a terrible language; it just requires a little different thinking. In 1988/89, I learned to write a postscript generator with no dev environment, just reams of paper. Debugging was hard since you had to add debugging print statements in the same document you were printing, which was hard if no printing occurred! I read Adobe Illustrator files, which were the precursor to PDF, so at least I had something to look at.