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Devil Lu Linvega

@pry Backus talks about how the current CPU design hinders alternative ways of programming because they might not map well to the current CPU/RAM style architecture where you branch and jump to labels and things.

That Bret Victor talk is excellent btw, I'm due for a rewatch.

22 Mar 2023 at 4:37 | Open on merveilles.town
8 comments
💜 pry 💜

@neauoire I suppose I wonder what an alternative CPU / assembly model looks like? a stack machine? I don't really know what a functional cpu would look like. maybe I should look into lisp machines

22 Mar 2023 at 5:09 | Open on raru.re
Devil Lu Linvega

@pry In the paper I linked up on top, if you can get over the snarky remarks ;), Backus goes on defining a few alternative futures, one of those is something like a stack machine.

But there's a lot of different possibilities, the lisp machines don't really do anything special but are still worth looking into: wiki.xxiivv.com/docs/memo528_c

You might get a kick out of the LispKit books(SECD-style), or the BQN VM(APL-style):
mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implem

@pry In the paper I linked up on top, if you can get over the snarky remarks ;), Backus goes on defining a few alternative futures, one of those is something like a stack machine.

But there's a lot of different possibilities, the lisp machines don't really do anything special but are still worth looking into: wiki.xxiivv.com/docs/memo528_c

22 Mar 2023 at 5:13 | Open on merveilles.town
Devil Lu Linvega

@pry alternatively, you can imagine a Thue-like computer where its only instruction is string replacement, and how that might look like.

wiki.xxiivv.com/site/thue.html

22 Mar 2023 at 5:18 | Open on merveilles.town
💜 pry 💜

@neauoire ooh this is a very interesting fixpoint sort of computation model

22 Mar 2023 at 5:21 | Open on raru.re
Devil Lu Linvega

@pry You might want to look into OCCAM parallel computing, or Fredkin's BBM: cell-auto.com/bbm/2d/index.htm

Or, imagine a OISC that is just Fractran, its one task is to hold prime encoded numbers and multiply! There's so many cool designs out there to try. I'd love to see a combinatory computer where opcodes are permutations of the combinatorics :mocking:

Or ternary! wiki.xxiivv.com/docs/dssp.txt

Or linear! plover.com/~mjd/misc/hbaker-ar

22 Mar 2023 at 5:24 | Open on merveilles.town
💜 pry 💜

@neauoire yea idk hardware design for these sorts of models is such a fascinating problem. this summer I'll be working at a company designing CPUs (am just doing software simulation work) but I rlly do want to spend some more time thinking about alternate methods of instantiating computation in hardware

22 Mar 2023 at 5:28 | Open on raru.re
💜 pry 💜

@neauoire ooh I have been meaning to look into SECD and yea just checked and the paper mentions Mago which looks like it might be another thread to look into

22 Mar 2023 at 5:19 | Open on raru.re
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