From: wware-nospam at world.std.com (Will Ware)
Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 23:17:29 GMT
Subject: Python for embedded controllers?
References: <F9HuLr.KwL@world.std.com> <370de606.77891472@news.oh.verio.com> <F9xpnF.GFq.0.spadina@torfree.net>
Message-ID: <F9zy15.8F@world.std.com>
Content-Length: 2085
X-UID: 954                                                  

Ken McCracken (aa175 at torfree.net) wrote:
: Neal Bridges in Toronto, Ont. has been developing an onboard Forth
: compliler for the Pilot for a while. People seem pretty well enthused
: about it and it is making converts to the Forth language and reattracting
: programmers who had given up on Forth. 

The two things I like about Forth are (1) the interactivity, and (2) the
interpreter is incredibly simple to understand; a bonehead like me can
code one up. I very much applaud the work Mike Gorlick's group is doing,
but it won't be interactive.

Well, it won't be interactive out of the box, but interactivity could
perhaps be added to it. An obvious approach is to implement a little
language in Python, compile the little langugage interpreter, and load
it onto the target board.

I can imagine another possible approach, but I'm not clever enough to
know if it's really feasible. Mike et al. are working on an implementation
of the Python virtual machine, to run on a target board. Maybe a Python
variant running on a host could have the parser and compiler without the
VM, and run all its compiled code on the target's VM.

The appeal of interactivity could be circumvented if one were to write
Python classes that adequately simulated the target board (and where,
necessary, the inputs and outputs from the real world). One could then
interact with a simulation on the host, and in a perfect world, the
code above the hardware simulation layer should port directly to the
target board. Mike's team's effort would apply directly to this
appproach.

If one went with this development model, it would make sense to maintain
the simulation and improve its accuracy as one developed one's application
code, and had to find and fix progressively subtler bugs. In the
aforementioned perfect world, there would be large open-source simulation
libraries for popular microcontrollers' on-chip
peripherals.
-- 
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Will Ware		email: wware[at]world[dot]std[dot]com
PGP fp (new key 07/15/97) 67683AE2 173FE781 A0D99636 0EAE6117




