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With a universal computational model already at our disposal, it will be
easier to use the virtual machine to specify itself than to define all
of it from scratch. For this purpose, we use the silly
programming language, whose name is an acronym for SImple Lisp-like
Language (Yeah right). The language serves essentially as a thin layer
of symbolic names on top of the virtual machine code. Due to its poor
support for modularity and abstraction, silly is not recommended
for serious application development, but at least it has a shallow
learning curve.1
[1] Previous releases of avram included a
working silly compiler, but this has now been superseded
by the Ursala programming language. Ursala includes silly as a subset
for the most part, and the examples in this manual should compile and
execute with very little modification.