Intent to package mixal
For those of you who are Knuth devotees like me, MIXAL should ring a
bell. For others, I have added a small description below [1].
I'm going to package a MIX/MIXAL implementation (unimaginatively
called mixal by its author), the one which was designed and written by
Darius Bacon, then ported to UNIX and debugged by Eric S. Raymond,
with corrections to multiplication and division by Larry Gately. The
source is available at the Retrocomputing Museum with a DFSG
compatible license.
This MIXAL reads, compiles and executes MIXAL programs in one process;
AFAIK you cannot key in your hand-compiled MIX code. This MIXAL does
not do floating-point (since its author had only Volume I avaliable),
but it should be good enough for working the exercises in TAOCP.
A problem is that I'm hesitating about where to put mixal: in
interpreters or in otherosfs. It is a MIXAL interpreter but it is
also a MIX emulator. Another problem is that the upstream executable
is called `mix', which will surely result in name clashes. Perhaps
taocp-mix or knuth-mix will be a better name. Comments?
Antti-Juhani
[1] MIXAL is the assembly language for Donald Knuth's imaginary
computer MIX. MIXAL is the chosen language in Knuth's monumental (and
yet unfinished) book series "The Art of Computer Programming", and all
example programs and programming exercises in it use MIXAL. The
computer MIX has (to my knowledge) never been implemented in hardware,
but several software emulators exist. The MIX has a 1960's
architecture with no hardware stack support, and will be replaced by
the equally imaginary RISC chip called MMIX 2009 [2] in future
editions.
[2] MMIX has a home page at
<URL:http://www-cs-staff.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/mmix.html>.
--
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%
EMACS, n.: Emacs May Allow Customised Screwups
(unknown origin)
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