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That's a nice snippet of the original source code! Does anyone recognize the language? Googling tells me that VisiCalc was written in Apple II (6502) assembly,
by gamache 5y ago
That's a nice snippet of the original source code! Does anyone recognize the language? Googling tells me that VisiCalc was written in Apple II (6502) assembly, but this is clearly not that.
- rylandking 5y agoYeah, pretty cool to see a photo of that. It was coded in assembler, first for the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor used in the Apple II.
- tyingq 5y agoI imagine the answer is somewhere in here: http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc http://rmf.vc/implementingvisicalc
- gamache 5y agoGreat link! The answer is that it's written in a custom 6502 assembler macro language that abstracted over looping, and the macros were an extension of a 6502 assembler that was hosted on Multics.
- mikestew 5y agoLooks like macro-heavy assembly to me. If one is not familiar with macro assemblers, in summary you could write your own language in macro assembler. And some did, which makes for a great debugging session if you're the one that has to fix it long after the original dev left. This page explains better than I ever will: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/assembly_programming/assembly_macros.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/assembly_programming/assembly...
- jedimastert 5y agoOT: I had a research project many years ago (it feels strange that I can now call it "many") that was to translate a program into C. The original program was written in "FORCE", which was a macro language extension on top of Fortran that we no longer had a compiler for. It was absolutely fascinating.