Assembler, but not at all

[jte]

Lots of good points raised by Jean-Baptiste and Piotr.

(09-22-2023 03:50 AM)komame Wrote:  During my studies, I wrote an assembler compiler. At that time, it was for x86 assembly, but the principle was similar. The result of the compilation was a ".com" file that could be run in a DOS environment
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Ah, the halcyon days of youth, when code flowed like water... For one university assignment, I was aiming to get a C compiler far enough along that it could compile itself (I wasn’t aiming to handle unions, bit-fields, and a few other odds and ends — just enough to compile the compiler). The target architecture was a “bytecode” for a “bytecode” interpreter (although, back then, it would’ve been termed a “p-code” interpreter) — but the interpreter I already had available for that p-code ran on 8-bit home computers, so I’m not sure how much compiling the compiled compiler could accomplish… (& the assignment deadline came before I could close the loop)

A while back I was pondering on the languages built into the HP Prime; I was thinking something Forth-ish might be nice, to carry on a bit of the stack tradition. But a very simple language close to the underlying cpu is certainly another possibility to consider.

At the moment, though, my plate is pretty full. And many of these sorts of decisions would involve internal discussions (and the reality of the commercial marketplace dictates certain priorities and possibilities — Python is certainly of interest in the educational community, and some improvements to Python support are in order). I’d like to improve the bug fixing process a bit, and fix some bugs (I’m wanting some more automation here; setting up automation takes time, but does streamline things once set up).