1 Nov
2011
1 Nov
'11
5:24 p.m.
On 15 Oct 2011, at 04:57, A. P. Garcia wrote:
What intrigued me about this is that it's such an
early example of an
abstract machine running as an interpreter. BCPL, roughly
contemporaneous, used ocode as an intermediate language, but it seems
this was intended to be further translated into assembly. While it's
possible to interpret ocode, in practice it seems this was rare, if it
was done at all.
I think there was at least one system which interpreted O-code (ocode?): the BCPL system
for the BBC micro. That machine was pretty short of RAM (32k but the screen and OS ate a
significant chunk of that, at least in some screen modes) but had a good deal of ROM, and
I think the ocode interpreter lived in ROM (as well, I assume as the BCPL compiler, though
that might itself have been an ocode program on a floppy, I'm not sure). I learnt
BCPL on that platform.