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In the 1980s I worked with a PDP-11 and wrote fortran programs, which DEC's compiler compiled into threaded code[1]. Unlike p-code, where each opcode is an act
by alejohausner 8y ago
In the 1980s I worked with a PDP-11 and wrote fortran programs, which DEC's compiler compiled into threaded code[1]. Unlike p-code, where each opcode is an action, in threaded code each opcode is the address of a function. Since these functions did more work than simple p-code instructions, the overall size of the compiled program was a lot smaller. This was a necessary tradeoff when you only had 32K of RAM to work with.
1. http://home.claranet.nl/users/mhx/Forth_Bell.pdf http://home.claranet.nl/users/mhx/Forth_Bell.pdf