INMC 80 News |
September 1980 – January 1981 · Issue 2 |
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I am prepared to offer the services of interface as a co-ordinating body and mailing address and I would very much like to know if any of the members of your club have had any involvement with, or would be prepared to become involved in a project or projects relating to this extremely important field.
My understanding of the situation concerning direct or indirect government support is that there is virtually nothing, and it is obviously going to require the pooling of resources of both private commercial organisations, private individuals, private charitable organisations, and research development capabilities which lie within the various places of advanced studies and teaching.
I have also been in touch with Peter Deacon who indirectly is liked with the Spastics Society and I would like to arrange a meeting of interested parties to discuss the matter further.
If you would be kind enough to publish this letter I know it would reach nearly two and a half thousand active Nascom users, some of whom may be prepared to assist in this project.
Yours sincerely,
J.A.Marshali,
Managing Director,
Interface Components Ltd.
Object of the INMC80 special interest group is to bootstrap a subset of Pascal to run on Nascom. Bootstrapping is the process whereby a very small subset of a language is implemented, and used to compile itself. This small compiler is then used to compile expanded versions of the subset until a satisfactory result is achieved.
Because of the amount of work in implementing a language, as much use as possible should be made of existing work. The Byte Tiny Pascal in Basic (1) or 8080 machine code (2) forms a good starting point, as the source is readily available, and an implementation for Nascom is under way (3) or commercially available (4). This program compiles the Pascal source into a series of subroutine calls to runtime support routines.
As a working aim, the intention is to implement a Pascal compiler for Nascom running under NAS-SYS, with floating point arithmetic to at least the accuracy of 8K BASIC (5), but possibly better, supporting the subset of Pascal implemented in the Byte Tiny Pascal, extended to include the Pascal ‘type’ constructs. The object machine is a 32K Nascom, with ideally runtime support in Eprom, and tape I/O for storage. For efficiency, the runtime routines will be written in machine code, and treated as system calls by the compiler. The program when finally completed will be inserted in the INMC80 program library, as will all the major intermediate steps.
Contact Point : Rory O’Farrell,
Tinode,
Blessington,
Co. Wicklow,
Ireland.
(Stamp or International Reply Coupon please).
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