Viewing profile — taolson

Since your language is very "rust-like", what made you choose Ocaml as the implementation language?

The FPU in the 29050 was based on the Am29325 bit-slice family FPU; an extra write port was added to the register file to allow for asynchronous FPU result writeback, which allowed…

The registers could also be partitioned into fixed sizes and protected, to allow for a banked register file that allowed for amazingly fast context switches in RTOS systems.

> Well that was basically an am29000 but with an x86 instruction decoder front end. The K5 was based upon a 29K-family design, but it was actually an un-released superscalar projec…

Yep, it wound up as the main CPU in a bunch of laser-printers, as well as Apple's 8*24GC QuickDraw accelerator card for the Macintosh, and as part of the flight-control computer on…

Wow, blast from the past! I was on the architecture / micro-architecture team for the 29K and 29050, and your story of writing and debugging the emulator brought up similar memorie…

Fun fact I learned from a Func Prog podcast: the name Steel Bank is a play on it's origin as Carnegie-Mellon Common Lisp (Carnegie made his fortune in Steel, while Mellon did so wi…

We actually did this in my freshman dorm room, as the paint color almost exactly matched the original Crest "green".

I remember a visit by Gasseé and a team of BeBox engineers to the PowerPC design center in Austin, where they demo'ed the yet-to-be released early version of the BeBox and OS. We w…

Sorry, I meant "Haskell / Miranda style syntax" -- e.g. curried functions, concise syntax with little boilerplate, etc. The word type is too overloaded ;-)

Nice to see another language with Haskell / Miranda type syntax, but the vibe-coded implementation sure shows: e.g. src/Compiler/Infer.sky isUpperStart: isUpperStart : String -> Bo…

An example where this is useful is to help inline otherwise recursive functions, by writing the function to take some useful parameters first, then return a recursive function whic…

I wrote this over the past two years to explore how pure, lazy, functional languages like Haskell and Miranda are implemented and efficiently compiled. It has evolved into a fairly…

Yes, the open-source release he did is what introduced me to Miranda. I rewrote a lot of my previous Haskell solutions to Advent of Code puzzles with it, and liked it so much I dec…

Don't know if my language is considered Lil' enough for this, but it's a pure, lazy functional language based upon Miranda (progenitor language to Haskell) that compiles to x86-64 …

Either newt was already in the list, or it got added. We talked a bit about using our languages for AoC 2024 -- looks like you've been keeping busy working on it!

The logo for Smalltalk-80, and later Squeak, came from the Robert Tinney cover of the Byte issue which introduced Smalltalk. The story behind it is documented here: https://wiki.sq…

Also this one, which originally came from Usenet days: https://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/cp48t...

The author includes some easter-eggs (printing random facts about Zen and various C constructs) which trigger randomly -- check out the file src/zen/zen_facts.c in the repository..…

>I made my own, with a Haskell+Bash flavor and a REPL that reloads with each keystroke That was impressive! Do you have a public repo with your language, anywhere?

Yes, there are some cool solutions using laziness that aren't immediately obvious. For example, in 2015 and 2024 there were problems involving circuits of gates that were elegantly…

AoC has been a highlight of the season for me since the beginning in 2015. I experimented with many languages over the years, zeroing in on Haskell, then Miranda as my language of …

Along that line, an over-engineered fizzBuzz using lazy list operations: https://github.com/taolson/Admiran/blob/main/examples/fizzBu...

Prolog's constraint solving and unification are exactly what is required for solving type-checking constraints in a Hindley-Milner type system.

>something AMD noted IIRC in the original K5 with its AMD29050-derived core Just a small nitpick: I've seen the K5/29050 connection mentioned in a number of places, but the K5 was …