ksimple is a tutorial in compression
summary: a week reading kparc's annotated minimal k. two ideas i stole and one i did not.
Core idea: ksimple clarified which compression techniques are pedagogical and which can survive in a production vector runtime.
ksimple is short because K was designed so the interpreter could be short.
That sounds tautological until you spend a week reading it, which is what I did. Every primitive in K is a function over types and the dispatch table is the program. Nine tenths of what most language implementations do - parsing structure, scope chains, type unification, error narratives - K either does not need or does in a few characters. The interpreter is not compressed against the language; the language has been designed for the interpreter, and ksimple is the receipt.
I will not write Rayfall like ksimple. The audience is different and the readability cost of the compression is real. But I keep the lesson: the size of the implementation is a property of the language, not of the implementor's cleverness. Make the language compress and the interpreter compresses for free.