From tfb at tfeb.org Wed Nov 2 02:24:00 2011 From: tfb at tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2011 16:24:00 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] b remnants? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: 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.