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Re: Proposed PDD format for Perl6's "assembly languagestandard"

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From:
Dan Sugalski
Date:
May 22, 2001 09:50
Subject:
Re: Proposed PDD format for Perl6's "assembly languagestandard"
Message ID:
5.1.0.14.0.20010522123420.02126dd8@24.8.96.48
At 11:27 AM 5/22/2001 -0400, Bryan C. Warnock wrote:
> From a design perspective, are they (bytecodes and opcodes) different, or is
>it simply a structure (linear vs tree, for instance) distinction?  Would
>the above cover the execution engine, the data dumper/restorer, or both?

They're definitely different.

>Secondly, we had talked at one point of actually writing an "assembly
>language" for Perl 6 as a way of testing opcode flow independent of Perl 6:
>The Language.  (As a way to develop the two halves in relative(!) isolation.)
>That was early on, but is it still the case?  Are these two concepts we want
>to merge, or keep separate?

We're going to develop an assembly language. Like so many others, it'll 
basically be a human-readable version of the machine code. (Bytecode in 
this case) Dunno about anyone else, but I've gotten a bit old to be 
decoding hex dumps on the fly. (Plus I end up trying to turn 'em into 6502 
assembly, and that's generally the wrong thing these days... :) Perl might 
not have as fully-featured an assembler as you may find on other platforms, 
but it will work.

Having an assembler may also make it easier for folks to write front ends 
for perl--they can just spit out a text representation of the bytecode they 
want, and we can build it for them. (Presuming that building the actual 
binary bytecode is at all tricky, which I hope it isn't)

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk


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