aiiadict@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 9, 8:26 pm, "William Garber" <willy4...@garberstreet.com> wrote:It's very interesting, but doesn't belong in this group. Am I wrong? If I was involved, I'd have been reprimanded way before this.you said it was off topic. so someone changed the topic :-) and a quote from earlier in the previous topic: ": > : And the problem of writing compilers for small memory : > : machines makes this relevant to this newsgroup. " What if these guys (computer science genius?) figured out how to write the ultimate compiler... for the Apple II..
They did write compilers for 8K (word) machines, but all their compilers I can remember were for machines with ~32-bit words. Still, that translates to about 32KB, and the interpreter is the only thing that has to handle data, so the method should be portable to an Apple II... I just saw that Wikipedia has a Digitek entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitek They developed their methodology for the SDS 900 series of computers, using the POP (Programmed OPerator) opcode on those machines to host a stack-based virtual machine. The compiler structure was mostly recursive-descent. A typical operator was QSF "string" (Quoted Scan or Fail), which would scan the input stream matching "string", or, if the scan did not match at some point, the op would "fail" the current procedure to its caller. After Ryan-McFarland, I'm not sure who got the rights to the technology, or if anyone is still using it. (I'm certainly willing to drop it if it has no relevance to the Apple II or its users.) -michael NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."