What do you do the day after Xmas? You play with your new toy! My wife offered me a CASIO FX-890P pocket computer. If you read my posts, you must know by now that I have a weakness for these computers, mainly if they use an out of norm programming language. I share already about LISP, PROLOG, PASCAL, FORTRAN-like, or CASL machines in the past. The FX-890P is programmable in C language. So, in the same device, I have already two of my favorites, as well as an x86 16-bit microprocessor – and its assembler (Intel 80L188EB). This machine is a perfect match for the RP-33 32KB memory expansion module that I installed swiftly (adding to the basic 64KB). With this model. I own all C-programable pocket computer ever made! One day, I will write my book dedicated to these little marvels. But that’s for later. For now, I can tell that the FX-890P, cousin of the Z1s, has a better display quality. I am still looking for some evidence of some variation in the C interpreters (yeah, not compiled). The other C pocket computer manufacturer is SHARP. The other thing I can share with you right now is that the editor and the approach of C by CASIO are superior to the SHARPs. In particular, CASIO doesn’t need line numbers! I don’t know why the SHARP interpreters depend upon this archaism carried over from BASIC. Well, for now, I will take my shot of C. Enjoy your holidays.
Hmmm, PROLOG havent heard that one for a very long time, bro! Let me take a guess a wanna be AI language, am I correct?
Kakistocracy You are absolutely right! Here is an extract of my posts on the topic: PROLOG was created by French researcher Alain Colmerauer in the 70’s and got its name from the contraction of PROgrammation en LOGique. The first Prolog system was developed two years later with the help of another French researcher, Philippe Roussel .
Prolog is well suited to implement first-order logics, and a Prolog application is a collection of facts and rules – a.k.a. knowledge data base –, against which, the inference engine issues queries to answer questions asked by the operator. The main problem with a serious Prolog program, is the exponential explosion of time and resources required to run the user’s queries.
First part of the post: plus.google.com – Misunderstandings – Part 1 Let’s begin today’s post with a reference to a Sc…
Second part of the post: https://plus.google.com/+JamelTayeb/posts/SGwLK8PpYdG
I am a noob, graduated at the bottom of my class in BASIC as far as programming is concerned. I worked best when using my brawns rather than brains. Hehe! heh!
If I interpret the images right, this little marvel runs both BASIC and interpreted C. Did you try a comparison regarding runtimes of similar problems in the two languages?
Also, I guess, without any optimizations to be applied during compilation, a simple C compiler is probably not much larger in size than an interpreter. What was the rationale behind going for interpreted C? Object code size?
Norbert Landsteiner in fact, this computer can be programmed in BASIC, C, ASM (with an assembler, not via DATA, POKE and CALL), as well as CASL. I did not compare the speeds yet. However, my hypothesis is that the performance difference for usual code will be minimal as you would spend most of your time in ROM routines to do useful stuff. The glue code (or driver code) would be very close. Maybe the CASL VM is the slowest of all, and the ASM the fastest. I wish I could find the list of primitives in ROM so I could call into them to see if – as in HP’s syscalls – you can bypass some possible, but yet to be found, argument validation code to gain some extra speed (and take some risk as well :)). Regarding the use of an interpreter versus a trivial compiler, I think that CASIO may use the same underlying technology for many languages implemented (in this system, but not only – see my post on CASL linked below for example). Why re-invent what already exist and works? I know that SHARP did the same technical choice for its own multi-language pocket computers.
plus.google.com – CASLs & COMETs In my post about the CASIO AI-1000, the only pocket computer t…
Yeah, using the same underlying engine with various “syntactical frontends” makes sense, especially, if there are 4 (!) languages.
(On the other hand, all languages could compile to the same P-code and you could even have compiled BASIC. However, CASL as a stack oriented system [if I understand this right] seems foreign enough to take you nowhere with that approach.)