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   alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Dec-2024 04:46:11 JST alcinnz

   Question to help me shape some upcoming threads:

   Say I'm bootstrapping from an assembly language to a (relatively) high-level language, without using any software I didn't write myself?

   Any tips?

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Dec-2024 04:52:23 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     • серафими многоꙮчитїи

     @djm62 I'll describe how I would!

     Yes, that link could be handy!

   • Embed this notice
     серафими многоꙮчитїи (djm62@beige.party)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Dec-2024 04:52:24 JST серафими многоꙮчитїи

     in reply to

     @alcinnz what do you mean "any software I didn't write myself"? You wrote the compiler and stuff for the high-level language?

     Is this relevant? Seems like the right direction but it's software written by everyone

     https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Dec-2024 10:42:19 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     • CMDR Yojimbosan UTC+(12|13)

     Here's my current thoughts on bootstrapping (from raw Assembly) a high-level language like Lua:

     1. I'd prefer to write declarative data rather than code, though if that data requires parsing or much in the way of interpretation it'd be counter-productive.

     2. Implementing syntax-highlighting could help me see what I'm doing.

     3. Per @yojimbo 's suggestion, implementing a Reverse-Polish-Notation assembler (resembling Forth or PostScript) would really help!

     More tips?

   • Embed this notice
     David Mankins (lain_7@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Dec-2024 12:57:38 JST David Mankins

     in reply to

     @alcinnz

     Scheme might be a good alternative to Forth.

     One of the nicest features of Scheme (and other LISPs) is the lack of syntax — everything is an S-expression. So parsing is trivial and you can concentrate on other aspects of the language.

     A LISPer friend once joked to me that he’d picked up a compiler book thinking he might learn some tricks, but it turned out the whole book was about tokenizing and parsing, which he considered a solved problem. And, of course, there’s Alan Kay’s comment about how one half page of the *Lisp 1.5 Manual* by McCarthy amounted to “the Maxwell’s Equations of programming”.

     Google “scheme in one defun” for a simple C implementation. Peter Norvig has a one-page implementation in Python.

   • Embed this notice
     alcinnz (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Dec-2024 12:57:57 JST alcinnz

     in reply to

     • David Mankins

     @lain_7 Will do!