I finally started coding the MIX simulator in Perl yesterday - it’s going pretty well !

I decided to start with the simulator itself, the “Virtual Machine” that reads raw MIX byte code and executes it. I will do the MIXAL compiler later - its syntax is not as simple as seemed first, I’ll probably use a real parser to process it.

Till now, I’ve implemented reading a memory image from a file, the registers, some of the framework (utility functions, convert this to that, etc), and all LOAD and STORE operations. It’s already about 500 lines of code.

About the input - I assume all memory is initialized to +0s, and only update what I read from the file. So, there can be a maximum of 4000 lines to read (one for each memory word). Each line is about 20-25 chars long, so the file can get pretty large (up to 100k). This is the “readable” input form. To those who like compact data, I’ll add another mode - reading from a binary file, tightly packed.

Related posts:

1. conversion tools that don’t scale
2. Initialization of structures and arrays in C++
3. Initializing an array in constant time

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2003 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Perl. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.