Re: Language/Compiler for 8/16 bit processor?

mago@sunmexico.sun.com writes:
>Where can I find information on languages designed for simple 8 bits
>processors? Simple 8 bits processors (like the 6502) have few registers
>and a non-orthogonal instruction set. I remember seeing ads a few years
>ago (10 years ago :) for languages that were designed so it would be easy
>to generate efficient code for these kind of processors.
>
>What I want to do is design a language that can be efficiently translated
>to 65816 assembly language. The 65816 is a 16 bit version of the 6502.


FORTH.


See Loeliger, _Threaded Interpretive Languages_, Byte Books, now out of
print. See also the Byte special issue on FORTH, especially the article
by Terry Ritter and Greg Walker, "Varieties of Threaded Code for Language
Implementation" or some such title. This was done in the late 1970s.


There were several C compilers for this class of machine, although I don't
know of any specifically for 6502. There was also Turbo Pascal for the
Z-80, which compiled and ran in 25K or so, under CP/M 2.2. Best-known of
the C compilers would be Ron Cain's Small-C, for which there is a textbook
and it is still in print.


PL/M-80 was primarily a macro processor; a *LOT* of the language was
"compiled" into subroutine calls to a HUGE library of very short routines.
This was because the 8080 call was 3 bytes, and the canonical "load
pointer" was 3 bytes; if the code sequence was more than about 7 bytes
long, the call saved memory in the long run. Some things were done with
inline code, but not that much.
--

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