Re: 6502 illegal opcodes questions

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> > Pining for APL are we?
> >
> > :-)
>
> Ah--brevity of expression carried to its limit--often described
> as a "write-only language".  ;-)
>
> It is interesting to think of APL as a subject for some advanced
> (dynamic) optimization.

Yes. Many people tend to feel high level languages are inefficient
because they're too abstract, but I feel they're inefficient because
they're not abstract enough :-)

> The "near applicative" nature of APLs semantics was quite well suited
> to parallel evaluation.  I wonder what modern optimization techniques
> and multiprocessor platforms could do with it today--perhaps with some
> semantic tweaks to clean things up.

I'm very sure we'll end up on a path towards "near applicative"
semantics. I imagine libraries of algorithms rather than 'code' and
compilers that truly understand computational complexity, plus take
full advantage of being able to determine the scope of an object to
distill things into extremely efficient machine representations. Couple
that with runtime instrumentation during development and test, and some
amazing possibilities open up.

These days I tend to write things in Ruby, which gives me SmallTalk
without SmallTalk, LISP without LISP (Ruby has the 'yield' operator
borrowed from CLU), Perl without Perl.

It's a great deal of fun to be able to combine full OO, lambda
calculus, dynamic rewriting of code, and not have to use something like
CLOS. Python has most of the same features, too, but I'm not fond of
its syntax so I found myself in the Ruby camp. It's great to be able to
use a pure OO scripting language and have the execution speed be very
respectable.

Matt