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Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

miniscript.org

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Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#51

Post by [deleted] »

talkingtab wrote: post #50
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fifth grade teacher here. Significant whitespace is a major reason I prefer Python for teaching programming. 1. I want kids to indent their code anyway; they may not realize it (or won't admit it), but this makes the code much easier for them to read. Kids will not do this unless they have to. 2. Unbalanced brackets are a major source of mistakes and confusion for my students. Relying purely on indentation resolves t…

Interesting point. I wonder if "easier for them to read" is too simple. I took "read" as in "read words" or "read a book". But "reading" a program is not I think the same as reading words. Reading words could be this: for i = 0 i But with a more pictorial presentation, it is easier to read the program. for i = 0 i I'm just wondering - if we had a more pictograph based programming language would it be easier to unders…

[deleted]

Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#52

Post by pjmlp »

K0balt wrote: post #27

I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user. IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is no…

Yes, they are more powerful than classical MS-DOS PCs, so there is plenty of juice in them.

Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#54

Post by volemo »

Someone wrote: post #47

https://miniscript.org/files/MiniScript-QuickRef.pdf : “A class or object is a map with a special __isa entry that points to the parent. This is set automatically when you use the new operator. Shape = {"sides":0} Square = new Shape Square.sides = 4 x = new Square x.sides // 4 ” So - Shape is a map (it is created using the syntax defined earlier, using a literal string as key) - Square is a class? - x is an object? O…

Yeah, I guess it’s prototype-based and the authors meant classes are indistinguishable from objects. And they all are just special cases of map.

Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#55

Post by mysterydip »

Lerc wrote: post #45
K0balt wrote: post #27

I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user. IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is no…

I have been thinking along those lines myself. I have been playing around with a per scanline generated display on a rp2350 outputting to a tiny LCD. I think there's potential for some pretty fancy stuff on HDMI. A 2350 with PSRAM, HDMI connector plus a MicroSD for bulk filesytem, and USB for input could be quite a fun micro PC. I would be tempted to make somthing that had a second RP2350 with its own PSRAM sitting u…

> I am a bit reminded of what GeoWorks Ensemble managed on a 640k 8086.

I was looking at similar recently for a project, and came across FrankOS: https://github.com/rh1tech/frank-os

Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#56

Post by joshmarinacci »

Rohansi wrote: post #29
layer8 wrote: post #23

Apparently it’s high-level only, i.e. no underlying machine instruction set or addressable memory.

That's how most of these fantasy machines are. Most people are only going to want to use a high-level language so it makes more sense this way.

True , but if it had a real ISA underneath then we could write custom emulators for them.

Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#57

Post by alex_x »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #31
alex_x wrote: post #2

I wonder why all these easy-to-learn languages use indentation to denote scope, not something like curly braces. Isn't it actually harder to explain?

while everyone already pointed out that this time it's not the case, I want to literally answer the question you asked "easy-to-learn languages" use indentation because otherwise newbies would not indent at all I you try teaching programming, you'll find that indentation is one of things students "optimize out" - it is not important to the program, it is opposite of lazy and it's not noticeably harmful on the tiny sc…

Easy-to-learn and built-for-learning-good-practices are two different things;

I think your point is perfectly correct but it's mostly about the second one

Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#58

Post by rm445 »

layer8 wrote: post #23

Apparently it’s high-level only, i.e. no underlying machine instruction set or addressable memory.

So... It's an interpreter (together with a virtual filesystem and some utilities) packaged into a program with a graphical display window? Still good for lots of interesting uses, I suppose, but surprising. Since it's introduced as a "virtual computer", I thought underneath the hood it would be emulating a machine. Then people, if they wanted, could tinker a level deeper than the scripting language, write an assembler etc.

Re: Mini Micro Fantasy Computer

#60

Post by jrmg »

tokai wrote: post #33
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free but not Open Source? Did I miss that? The miniscript language itself is MIT License: https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript The Minimicro code doesn't seem to have any license in the repository or code: https://github.com/JoeStrout/minimicro-sysdisk

So Open Source but not Free (Libre).

For miniscript: the Free Software Foundation considers the MIT license (which they call the ‘Expat License’ to distinguish it from the ‘X11 License’) to be ‘free’ (and GPL compatible), but not ‘copyleft’.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat

For minimicro-sysdisk: I am suspicious that the author just forgot to include a license. Their other repos are mostly MIT or ‘The Unlicensed (also ‘free’ but not ‘copyleft’), and some have licenses added after creation. Suspicion is not something to be legally relied on of course…

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