OISC is something you sometimes get to build in EE labs, usually as the last project for that class. It's something that you can put together out of 7400s and, at least in our case, an eeprom for a lookup table. It's a fun thing to do and I recommend it.
One instruction set computer
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Re: One instruction set computer
#22Side note: Douglas W. Jones was touting this [1] in a computer architecture class in the mid-1980s. Fun stuff. He later went on to do a lot of work with computerized voting [2][3]. Great instructor...
[1] http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/arch/risc/ [2] http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/pictures/ [3] http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/
Re: One instruction set computer
#23See also John Tromp's "interpreter for the simplest language possible"
Re: One instruction set computer
#24[deleted]
Re: One instruction set computer
#25A fun challenge is to try to write a quine [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)] in an OISC.
Re: One instruction set computer
#26At one point I was seriously fascinated by the lambda calculus and particularly the S and K combinators - two very simple functions that you can build any computation from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus More recently I found out about the U combinator which is a single combinator that can be used to define S & K: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_and_Jot Having a system that implemented recursi…
It would look like a very (very!) long string of U's. :-) You might enjoy this: http://www.flownet.com/ron/lambda-calculus.html
Presumably a tree of U's.
Re: One instruction set computer
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would look like a very (very!) long string of U's. :-) You might enjoy this: http://www.flownet.com/ron/lambda-calculus.html
Presumably a tree of U's.
Oh, right. Good point.
It's worth noting, BTW, in case anyone is still following this thread, that what is going on here in all of these single-instruction languages is not particularly interesting. You're just encoding the program semantics in the arguments, or in the structure of the tree, or the length of the program, or something like that, rather than in the instructions.