On Fri, 27 Oct 2017 02:31:57 -0400 Brian White <bw.al...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >C and the 8080 are just not a good match. C is very stack oriented > >and the 8080 is... not. > > That is an interesting concept that I had no awareness of before. Is > there anything else that would be any more naturally suited, or is it > just that the cpu is primitive and there's no getting around that? > Humm. That's a fascinating question! PL/M comes to mind -- it's a subset of PL/1 specifically tuned to the 8080's quirks. Turbo Pascal had a reputation for generating fast code. As much as I like dissing Microsoft, their compilers (FORTRAN, COBOL, even BASIC) all used a register-based parameter-passing scheme that avoided a lot of messy & slow stack manipulations. I wouldn't say that the 8080 is just primitive... It just wasn't really designed to support high level languages. But it can be made to, and that's the important thing. If we were really worried about efficiency we wouldn't be using 30 year old computers. ;-) > I have tried to play with this FORTH option rom > http://www.strangegizmo.com/products/mforth/ > but I don't really know what I'm doing. > I feel your pain. My last attempt to learn FORTH was with mforth. It didn't go well. :-/ Willard -- Willard Goosey goo...@sdc.org Socorro, New Mexico, USA I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night. -- R.E. Howard
