Re: Hello - and where to begin: Sourceless Programming

On 22/01/2008, Jeff Fox <[email protected]> wrote:
>  the "sourceless" era for Chuck was the early nineties where he
> used the hex editor tool in ok to add code to the cad system.
> "ok" also known as "3/4th" had a gui, a hex editor, a font
>  editor, a tiled graphic editor, and a decompiler with a
> dictionary of names but Chuck was the compiler.

Threaded or machine code? I always thought a sourceless system using
indirect threaded code would be a lot more practical than one using
straight machine code, simply because the correspondence is already so
close. Add [ ... ] to memoise a constant (so that it only executes the
first time it's run, and thereafter just returns the result), and {
... } to return the address of a chunk of code to execute later, and
you have something with which any Jupiter ACE owner would be
immediately familiar - that was also a sourceless system. (It had the
fascinating property that comments would slow down execution, as the
time to jump over the inlined text was greater than 0.)

In fact, colorForth source more or less IS threaded code - just token
threaded, rather than indirect threaded, and with a number of possible
ways of interpreting each token - and the inner interpreter has become
the outer interpreter...

Regards
Gwenhwyfaer