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jloughry
BANCStar
C++2013–2025
jloughry / BANCStar

BANCStar

BANCStar source code

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
9Distinct people
12Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
170GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

BANCStar source code

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year12 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-03-13 17:15:05 UTC to 2025-09-09 04:07:51 UTC.

0123452013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

12 sources
bitwize·Sep 9, 2025
Sounds similar to, but not as bletcherous as, BANCStar, a famed "esolang" that was really the output of a form generation tool used in the finance industry in the 90s. Some engineers figured out that the form generator's output was actually expressed in a Turing-complete, though very arcane, notation replete with opcodes and operands, reverse-engineered it, and started working directly in this language without using the tool to do more sophisticated things than the tool enabled on its own. The boss man probably said "Great! When can we put this into production?" and it's been downhill since. https://esolangs.org/wiki/BANCStar https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar Relatedly, a long time ago I discovered that Zenographics Mirage—a vector graphics/illustration program originally designed to run on like, VAXen, with both a text terminal and a
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graphics terminal with a digitizing tablet (similar to this setup seen on Reading Rainbow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_zYaIxb6dY&t=965s), but later ported to PCs—ran on a sort of bytecode. There were a number of sample scripts shipped with the package that allowed you to automate things in Mirage's command language. Some of them had statements like DO 62,2,32472,32476,0 and comments that read "Don't worry about this, this is just Mirage assembly language." Intrigued, I discovered in the manual a feature you could enable called Op Code Monitor that flashed similar numbers whenever you entered a command. It was mentioned but not documented in detail, nor what the numbers meant, but from that and the scripts I could make some pretty good guesses. I figured out how to make Mirage prompt for a point and store it in a register; and with that I made a command to draw a rectangle that could be rotated. A rectangle in Mirage was defined by its corner points, so when you attempted to rotate it it just rotated the corner points and drew an axis-aligned rectangle with the new corner points. My command accepted two corner points and drew a polyline, so that when you rotated it, the whole rectangle rotated.
In The key points of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code"
cbd1984·Nov 12, 2014
> It's such a shame that for all its popularity, Git spits in the face of so many of these rules (least surprise, reversibility, failure, silence, predictability, etc.). Probably an artifact of the fact git was originally designed to be a kit others could use to make a DVCS with a nice interface. Which might point to another maxim: Always expect that your interfaces will be used widely, even if you don't expect them to be. An extreme, pathological example of this is the BANCStar programming language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANCStar_programming_language http://reocities.com/ResearchTriangle/station/2266/tarpit/ba... https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar
In The Art of Unix Usability (2004)
jloughry·Sep 1, 2013
I did something like that once for a truly awful machine-language-like system I had to work with at a bank: 8607,,,1 11547,15475,22002,22002 1316,1629,1,1649 3001,1316,3,30078 11528,22052,22002,22002 9301,0,1528,1528 31568,10001,800,107 8560,,,1568 8550,210,, 3001,,, 3100,1316,3,30089 11547,15475,22002,22002 3001,1316,3,30089 3001,1317,3,10000 8400,,, 8550,700,801, 3001,,, 9301,0,522,522 3000,1284,3,10001 8500,,3, 8500,,5, 1547,,1,-2301 Through the translator, the result looked like this: https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar/blob/master/README.md The arrows in the margin duplicated the handwritten notation developed by programmers to deal with the numeric machine code. If a colour printer had been available at the time, it would have duplicated the highlighter pens those programmers used too; i
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nstead I used boldface, italics, underlining, and condensed characters to accomplish the same thing.
In Grace Hopper

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