2.8 KiB
SixtyPical
SixtyPical is a very low-level programming language, similar to 6502 assembly, with static analysis through abstract interpretation.
In practice, this means it catches things like
- you forgot to clear carry before adding something to the accumulator
- a subroutine that you call trashes a register you thought was preserved
- you tried to write the address of something that was not a routine, to a jump vector
and suchlike. It also provides some convenient operations and abstractions based on common machine-language programming idioms, such as
- copying values from one register to another (via a third register when there are no underlying instructions that directly support it)
- explicit tail calls
- indirect subroutine calls
The reference implementation can execute, analyze, and compile SixtyPical programs to 6502 machine code.
SixtyPical is a work in progress. The current released version of SixtyPical is 0.9-PRE (not released yet.)
Documentation
- Design Goals
- SixtyPical specification
- SixtyPical revision history
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical syntax
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical execution
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical analysis
- Literate test suite for SixtyPical compilation
- 6502 Opcodes used/not used in SixtyPical
TODO
Operations on 16 bit values
Compare word (constant or memory location) with memory location or pointer. (Maybe?)
And then write a little demo "game" where you can move a block around the screen with the joystick.
vector table
type
low
and high
address operators
To turn word
type into byte
.
save registers on stack
This preserves them, so that, semantically, they can be used later even though they are trashed inside the block.
And at some point...
copy x, [ptr] + y
- Maybe even
copy [ptra] + y, [ptrb] + y
, which can be compiled to indirect LDA then indirect STA! - Check that the buffer being read or written to through pointer, appears in approporiate inputs or outputs set.
- initialized
byte table
memory locations - always analyze before executing or compiling, unless told not to
trash
instruction.interrupt
routines.- 6502-mnemonic aliases (
sec
,clc
) - other handy aliases (
eq
forz
, etc.) - have
copy
instruction able to copy a constant to a user-def mem loc, etc. - add absolute addressing in shl/shr, absolute-indexed for add, sub, etc.
- check and disallow recursion.
- automatic tail-call optimization (could be tricky, w/constraints?)
- re-order routines and optimize tail-calls to fallthroughs