SMITH

Self-Modifying Indecent Turing Hack

Version 2.1-2012.0916.
Copyright ©2000-2012 Chris Pressey, Cat's Eye Technologies. All rights reserved.

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"This space intentionally left blank."

— MIT's Dungeon (later Infocom's Zork I)

"The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon."

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

What is SMITH?

SMITH, the successor to SMETANA, is a programming language that goes one better than Bullfrog. Not only are there no conditional jumps, there are no jumps whatsoever. The program counter can only be incremented, and only instruction by instruction.

What the...???

But, you ask, how can such an ungodly beast be Turing-Complete? Surely this goes against all that is decent and good and sane in the world we know. (OK, maybe you won't put it exactly that way - I forgive you.)

Well, there's actually a relatively straightforward answer. Instead of jumping back into code to repeat and/or recheck something, you must instead copy blocks of code forward, where they will be checked in the near future.

And if the code copied forward includes the instruction that caused the copy in the first place, that will happen again (and again and again) when the copy executes. A loop, but not by means of iteration or recursion but instead by self-propogation.

Otherwise, SMITH is basically a small generic imperative CISC-ish virtual machine with only the most basic arithmetic operations, loosely modelled on the "[imaginary] register machine that is representative of several minicomputers" described in section 9.2 of the Dragon Book.

And when I say loosely modelled, I mean it. Differences between this and the 'Dragon' machine include the fact that this has no ADD instruction, and that here, the destination is specified before the source (not after;) also, the # before an immediate (literal) is allowed but not required here, and the indirection syntax is completely different (there's only indirect references to registers, not memory, anyway.)

Overview

Consider the SMITH machine to have an unlimited number of registers. These are called R0 to Rn where no arbitrary limit is imposed on n. In some instructions, they may be referenced indirectly, and in that case they are called R[R0] to R[Rn].

An indirect reference like R[R0] refers to 'the register whose number is the number stored in register zero.' If R0 contained 7, then R[R0] would be synonymous with R7.

Each instruction has the general form:

  OPCODE [destination[, source[, length]]]

(Here, the square breackets denote "may be omitted", not indirect references.)

destination is either the name of a register or an immediate offset from the current program counter. source is either a register, an immediate offset from the current program counter, or an immediate integer. length, if present, is the name of a register. All integers are notated in decimal. # may precede immediate integers if the programmer desires. However, it may not precede offsets (they should be preceded by either + or -.)

Instructions

The basic instructions (available in the original version) are:

  MOV register, immediate       e.g.  MOV R0, 0
  MOV register, register              MOV R1, R0

  SUB register, immediate             SUB R1, 1
  SUB register, register              SUB R0, R1

  MUL register, immediate             MUL R0, 2

  NOT register                        NOT R0

  COR offset, offset, register        COR +1, -5, R0

  STOP                                STOP

The instructions in the following table were made available in SMITH v2 (June 25 2000).

  MOV [register], register            MOV R[R1], R0
  MOV register, [register]            MOV R1, R[R0]

  MOV [register], "string"            MOV R[R0], "nights and weird mornings"

  MOV register, PC                    MOV R303, PC
  MOV register, *                     MOV R304, *

  MOV TTY, register                   MOV TTY, R1
  MOV TTY, [register]                 MOV TTY, R[R65535]
  MOV register, TTY                   MOV R0, TTY
  MOV [register], TTY                 MOV R[R0], TTY

  MUL register, register              MUL R999999999, R123456789

  COR offset, register, register      COR +1, R22, R23

  BLA offset, NOP, register           BLA +2, NOP, R10

  NOP                                 NOP

SMITH v2 also added two directives:

  ; arbitrary text comprising a source comment              ; Kilroy was here
  REP int OPCODE [destination[, source[, length]]]          REP 50 STOP

Explanation

MOV will assign a register a value without modifying it.

The TTY forms of MOV are just a lazy way to refer to some (potentially complex) system routine for the 'usual' input and output character streams, so the program can communicate (in some primitive fashion) with the user.

The PC and * forms of MOV facilitate calculating absolute addresses of subroutines. Actually, * is more like a macro which expands to the current line number in the source file.

The "string" form of MOV moves each character of the immediate string into a successive register. If R0 contained 7, then MOV R[R0], "cat" would result in R7 == 'c', R8 == 'a', R9 == 't'.

SUB and MUL will subtract or multiply a register by a value, respectively. NOT will boolean-negate a register (false = 0/zero, true = 1/nonzero.)

COR is the truly interesting opcode; it stands for COpy by Register. The value of the length operand (which is always in a register) is a count of instructions. This many instructions is copied from the source offset (which may be immediate or in a register) to the destination offset (which is always immediate), modifying the program (thus, self-modifying code.)

Note: prior to version 2007.0722 of the SMITH language, the result of actually overwriting existing instructions with other instructions was not defined. The original idea was that SMITH programs would merely extend themselves by copying bits of themselves to just past the end of the program, like Sylvester chasing Tweety around the Christmas tree on a toy train -- and I still think that's all that's needed for SMITH to be Turing-complete. However, since the language does reasonably claim to be fully "self-modifying" and not just "self-extending" (SEITH?!?), it's official: as of version 2007.0722, you can overwrite instructions with other instructions using COR. Even when the source and destination ranges of such a copy overlap, the resulting series of instructions at the destination should be an exact copy of the series at the source.

Note note: It seems some of you are having trouble understanding the version system being used for SMITH, which is eminently understandable given that it is completely inconsistent. The first version had no version. The second version, released a scant few days later, containing many new instructions, was "v2". That version was re-christened "version 2.0L" when we added the BSD license to it (because "L" is for "license", y'see?) The third version, released a scant few years later, was "version 2007.0722". This was back when we thought date-based version numbers could substitute entirely for sequence-based version numbers. This version was also known as "version 2.1 revision 2007.0722" when we dropped that idea. The current version, which differs mainly in that its documentation contains this paragraph, is version 2.1-2012.0916. Your knowledge is now complete. Go home.

BLA is kind of a special version of COR that makes some programming a lot easier. It stands for BLAnk and as part of it's very special format it takes an immediate opcode as its second argument. It copies that opcode (which must be either NOP or STOP) to the offset, and uses the number found in the length register as a multiplier.

Execution starts at the beginning of the program (well, naturally,) and stops when the program counter tries to execute beyond the last instruction specified in the program. A STOP instruction will also serve this purpose, if you choose to use it.

Huh.

So there you go. Myth debunked. You don't need if or goto or while or anything so fancy to be Turing-Complete. All you need is to be able to memcpy yourself! Don't that just take the cake?