Re: Progrmaming in Bytecode?

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Dan Ingalls wrote:

> This reminded me that, about ten years ago I wrote in a day or two a
> little assembler for a simple processor.
>
> Anyway, since I said "a page or two", I thought I should put my money
> where my mouth is, so I'm sending along that old code.  Unfortunately
> it's for a slightly different dialect from Squeak, but most of the code
> should still work if you file off the rough edges.  There's nothing
> great about it, but if people think assemblers are hard, this should
> help to allay that fear.

Fun! I'll have to play with it.

People think assemblers are hard?  I always imagined that it'd be a lot
easier to write an assembler than a compiler.  I'm a biologist, not a
computer scientist or elec engineer, but I always thought that you don't
do more than superficial optimization within an assembler, but simply
translate human-readable opcodes, like translating "returnTop" in SqVM
assembly to the byte 7C.

Aaron