A new RPL firmware for the 50g

[Claudio L.]

(01-02-2014 10:17 PM)David Hayden Wrote:  I suspect that most of the ten zillion existing stack manipulation commands could be replaced with calls to SHUFFLE or REARRANGE and rather than spending 20 minutes figuring that SWAPUNROT 4PICKDUPDUP is the sequence that you need to get the stack arranged the way you want it, you can just tell SHUFFLE or REARRANGE what you want.

This is really cool, and it doesn't make the language any less compatible. Perhaps we should start writing a language specification of some sort? Something simple, with the base functions we need, the object types we need, etc., which will then serve as a guideline to implement things.
It'll be interesting to gather ideas to define the language **before** we attempt an actual implementation, otherwise we might end up redoing a lot of code.
For example, what type of numbers are we going to use? what precision?
One possibility:
BINTS = 32-bit (64 would take a lot of space, or is it justified?)
REALS = (binary or decimal?) how many digits? we have decNumber which supports a lot of different precisions, but memory use and speed might suffer if we increase precision. Perhaps 34 digits (decimal128) is a good tradeoff? or an overkill?

Claudio