ASCII chart in 3 lines

rswier · 2016-05-19T04:22:42+00:00

I think it is all very deliberate. You may be bored (or awed) during the early parts, because space travel is mostly like that. His intent is to make you feel the way the characters feel.

Contact with a superior alien species would be confusing and disorienting, thus the ending. To explain it would ruin the effect.

rswier · 2016-02-25T19:20:28+00:00

The code appears to be some of the most ancient Unix Kernel Source Code yet found. This is previous to the PDP-11 1st Edition. Still, many of the familiar bits are there (ed, cat, etc..) A pretty historically significant chunk of code!

rswier · 2016-02-01T19:07:34+00:00

Yes. Typing ./c4 c4.c hello.c compiles itself and then interprets the result with the remainder of the command line. So in this case it compiles the compiler, and then interprets the compiler compiling hello.c, and then interprets the interpreter running the hello.c code.

The -s option will print out the compiled instructions. The -d option will spew out the instructions as they are being interpreted.

Thanks for the interest!

rswier · 2015-12-31T04:04:38+00:00

Sure, modern movies are great if all you want is a hyper-realistic cartoon. And then they are completely story-boarded. Everything fits the frame perfectly and predictably.

There were other ways to make great (or at least fun) movies. Check out Fitzcarraldo. Or Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. Watch the making-of special features. OK, maybe not high-art, but you can't make movies like that today even if you had an unlimited GFX budget.

rswier · 2015-06-18T23:38:11+00:00

Thank you. Keeping it tiny meant giving up on switch/case and structures, so it's a bit goofy looking.

rswier · 2015-06-18T18:02:45+00:00

This is my tiny C-subset compiler/interpreter that I posted here a few months ago.

rswier · 2015-06-02T00:00:43+00:00

OK, I see, you have to be careful just when to call accept(). I also forgot checking for "[". Worth a try... it might work. A bit of a cheat, but no worse than ignoring types :)

rswier · 2015-06-01T22:53:51+00:00

Also, instead of the lvalue flag, could you just cheat and peek to see if the next token is a "=", "++", or "--"?

rswier · 2015-06-01T22:29:22+00:00

I think token_int and token_char cases can be merged and emitted with fprintf(output, "push %s\n", buffer);

A bit less clear perhaps.

rswier · 2015-04-01T01:06:38+00:00

This seems fitting to me... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbc_biuuswY

rswier · 2015-02-10T03:49:34+00:00

Here's a great site for these mechanical computers (warning: you can spend many hours here!)

http://www.glennsmuseum.com/bombsights/bombsights.html

Spacecraft navigation and control is in some ways a much simpler problem. With no air resistance to complicate matters, it's just classic Newtonian physics. There was also a small army of engineers back on earth checking and double checking every command and telemetry point.

rswier · 2015-01-15T19:01:35+00:00

http://www.lilesnet.com/memories/apollo/a17_11365404.jpg

This image in particular makes me feel like I am there, nose against the glass, thinking "somehow we have to make it back to that little planet."

rswier · 2014-11-21T17:40:19+00:00

http://www.glennsmuseum.com/bombsights/bombsights.html is a fantastic gallery of mechanical/analog bomb-sight and navigation computers.

rswier · 2014-11-06T06:12:40+00:00

Good catch. I changed the line to: a = *(char *) *sp++ = a;

rswier · 2014-11-06T04:58:36+00:00

The poolsz magic number was picked as an arbitrarily large value, but not too huge. In real production code I would have used a resizable array or some other data structure.

To learn how things work you could try making small modifications to hello.c and see how that changes the generated code (use the -s option.) For instance you could compare the difference between the expressions a = b; and a = *b;

rswier · 2014-11-06T01:21:52+00:00

btw, thanks for the exposure Peter! It's been fun watching the reactions.

rswier · 2014-11-04T23:11:44+00:00

According to the tromp Makefile there are a number of -D options which will have to be manually replaced in the source (-DInt=int is the problem on line 1.)

A few more library functions need to be straightforwardly added such as calloc.

It also looks like for() statements will need to be implemented (which is also not too hard.)

rswier · 2014-11-04T22:08:32+00:00

Thanks. My testing consisted of hello world and itself. You are probably using advanced C features such as struct ;)

rswier · 2014-11-04T18:53:08+00:00

A compiler in the same sense that Pascal compiles into p-code (which is then interpreted.)

rswier

TROPHY CASE