Bootstrappable language

Some further comments... Jim> Ben you have said these three things in this thread: Jim> (1) "Any good leads as am still looking for a small boot Jim> strapable langauge here." Jim> (2) "Tiny C will not work as my instruction set does NOT have Jim> register to register operations." Jim> (3) "I could do Forth but it would be slow as I have no Jim> auto-incriment registers and wound need to use memory Jim> variables." Jim> ...I don't see why the lack of register to register ops would Jim> prevent implementing a tiny C. There is nothing in the language Jim> that would demand it. Agreed. Consider that C was first implemented on a machine that doesn't have such ops. And for that matter, doesn't have auto increment ops either. Similarly, you don't need stack ops to have a stack; C compilers exist for plenty of machines like that. (The 360 comes to mind -- gcc handles that. And I know there was a C compiler for the CDC 6000 series, though it appears to have been lost.) In any case, I second the suggestion of Forth. Forth was originally designed as a real time control system language; it's both fast and small. The limited instruction set Ben mentioned will make some difference but I doubt it's large, especially since memory is pretty fast compared to the CPU of low end machines. I've done some large scale worth with FIG Forth; a full port of that to a PDP-11 which (if memory serves) took 8 kbytes. That was usermode code, so no drivers (but instead OS interfaces, which is probably not all that different). Another place where Forth has been used: several popular workstations use it for their bootloaders. Sun does (or did) and I think Apple does too. At least I once got an "ok" prompt when I powered up a very confused Power Mac... and it answered like Forth interactive mode. Porting Forth is very easy because most of a Forth implementation (FIG Forth is a good example) is in Forth; only 10% or so is assembler for the target machine and these are low level primitives that are easy to design and code. That leaves some drivers, which you can code in Forth, and if the hardware is at all close to industry standards (like a UART probably will be) you can just use a stock driver and drop it in. paul