Re:I built a hardware processor that runs Python
by zahlman on Monday April 28, 2025 @01:26PM
(#43823837)
In university, for my undergrad thesis, I wanted to do this for a Befunge variant (choosing the character set to simplify instruction decoding). My supervisor insisted on something more practical, though. :(
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Re:I built a hardware processor that runs Python
by zahlman on Monday April 28, 2025 @04:15PM
(#43825613)
I probably should have added a link: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Befunge
The main thing that appealed to me about this idea is that it would require a two-dimensional program counter. As I recall from the original specification, skipping through blank space is supposed to take O(1) time, but I didn't plan on implementing that. I did, however, imagine a machine with 256x256 bytes of memory, where some 80x25 (or 24?) region was reserved as directly memory-mapped to a character display (and protected at boot by surrounding it with jump instructions).