why?
Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#12In the 1990s, when I was in college, I wrote a 6502 emulator in a text editor macro language (the text editor was QEdit, a DOS editor that was popular at the time). It was completely useless but a lot of fun.
There was a very low hard limit on the number of jumps (32, if I recall correctly) that complicated things. I eventually had to resort to a two step process, first translating 6502 code to a simpler virtual machine (using and abusing the find-and-replace command), and then executing that simpler code.
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#13why?
Sweden, Too much time, Masterthesis was submitted.
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#14this is cool and you seem obviously intelligent, have you considered making something people want?
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#15this is cool and you seem obviously intelligent, have you considered making something people want?
sometimes, cool is enough :) I might actually want this though. C is much more convenient than TeX to code in, and yet sometimes you have no choice. Until now.
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#16I wonder if this could be modified to control actual hardware? It looks the `\write18` command can be used to execute shell commands if LaTeX is run with the `--shell-escape` option. So in theory you could intercept all writes to the GPIO control registers and use a shell command to send bytes over the serial port to a physical MCU (or something like the SparkFun SPI Shortcut.)
Imagine a LaTeX document that, when processed, reads a series of measurements from a sensor over the serial port, then renders nice graphs directly to a PDF! :)
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#17We need more of this.
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true, but largly in TeX and only Parts of it in LaTeX is still LaTeX. But you're right, I did use only a few rudimentary features.
I think this is the minority view of LaTeX: it's built on top of and is a subset of TeX, not a superset. No one would ever consider \def to be LaTeX for example. Not to denigrate what you produced of course.
I've always thought of LaTeX as more of a superset, but I see where you are coming at (I've read the TeXbook)
Re: Show HN: Avremu – An 8-Bit Microcontroller in Pure LaTeX
#19I wonder if this could be modified to control actual hardware? It looks the `\write18` command can be used to execute shell commands if LaTeX is run with the `--shell-escape` option. So in theory you could intercept all writes to the GPIO control registers and use a shell command to send bytes over the serial port to a physical MCU (or something like the SparkFun SPI Shortcut.) Imagine a LaTeX document that, when pro…
I was looking for this workflow for my research, and ended up going with an ipython notebook.