Python in Sept. Nuts & Volts

[Steven D. Majewski]

On Sat, 23 Sep 2000, Kragen Sitaker wrote:

> In article <6eboss8fd0qbjub02vt11soog0gm5bjvba at 4ax.com>,
> Tim Roberts  <timr at probo.com> wrote:
> >"Steven D. Majewski" <sdm7g at virginia.edu> wrote:
> >>This months Nuts & Volts magazine has an article by Tim Deagan 
> >>( actually part 2 -- I missed last month ) on writing a 
> >>PIC 16C84 disassembler in Python. 
> >>
> >>( Now: anyone have any ideas on how to get Python onto a PIC? ;-)
> >
> >For those who don't get the joke, allow me point out that the typical PIC
> >processor has 8k bytes of ROM and 192 bytes of RAM.  Yep, that's 192,
> >without any of them there fancy suffixes, like M or K.
> 
> That doesn't make it impossible to run programs in a high-level
> language like Python on it, although it might make other languages
> (like FORTH) a better choice.  It does mean that you need a compiler
> that's pretty good at optimizing and really good at throwing away
> things you don't need.
> 

One trick I've seen done is to put the core VM in ROM, and to read
the byte code stream from an I/O port attached to external
memory. I think that would be such major surgery to the codebase
that it might be better to start fresh designing a python-like 
language better suited for tiny-footprint devices. After all, it's
not like you're going to get the whole standard library in there 
and have much compatability with code from Windows, Unix, Mac... 


---|  Steven D. Majewski   (804-982-0831)  <sdm7g at Virginia.EDU>  |---
---|  Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics  |---
---|  University of Virginia             Health Sciences Center  |---
---|  P.O. Box 10011            Charlottesville, VA  22906-0011  |---
		"All operating systems want to be unix, 
		 All programming languages want to be lisp."