4 ms·
There were numerous compilers for the 6502.
by Turing_Machine 4y ago
There were numerous compilers for the 6502.
- sllabres 4y agoI'll remember well UCSD Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal especially as compiling on a system with one floppy drive required 5-6 changes of the floppy disk even for a 'hello world'. So one would think twice before starting the compiler only to find a simple syntax error after a minute or two. :)
- dwheeler 4y agoAbsolutely true, there were and are MANY compilers for the 6502. However, the 6502 was a challenge to implement high-level languages on, IF you also wanted speed and small code size. But since the 6502s were slow compared to modern chips, and could only address 64KiB directly, you typically also wanted speed and small size. I posted some links to some approaches here: https://dwheeler.com/6502/ https://dwheeler.com/6502/
- buescher 4y agoI always thought Action! was very crisply tailored to these small systems. It turns out to have been a port of a language called Micro-SPL from the Xerox Alto that (originally) targeted the Alto microcode directly. Atalan and Plasma look nice.
- kjs3 4y agoSure...they were amazingly widespread machines back in the day so lots of people took a whack at a 6502 compiler (at college if nothing else). But how many could take on non-trivial programs and emit code that would be considered production level? I know Apple Pascal was supposed to be pretty good, but what else?
- buescher 4y agoI am pretty sure there were at least a couple of commercial games and applications written in valFORTH on the Atari 800. Possibly Action! also; for some reason I thought Paperclip was written in Action! but apparently not. There were a lot of magazine games and utilities written in Action!, though.