git @ Cat's Eye Technologies SixtyPical / 8766601
A little note on the history. Chris Pressey 4 years ago
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doc/Design Goals.md less more
2424
2525 The intent is not to make it absolutely impossible to make such errors,
2626 just harder.
27
28 ### Some Background ###
29
30 The ideas in SixtyPical came from a couple of places.
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32 One major impetus was when I was working on [Shelta][], trying to cram
33 all that code for that compiler into 512 bytes. This involved looking
34 at the x86 registers and thinking hard about which ones were preserved
35 when (and which ones weren't) and making the best use of that. And
36 while doing that, one thing that came to mind was: I Bet The Assembler
37 Could Track This.
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39 Another influence was around 2007 when "Typed Assembly Language" (and
40 "Proof Carrying Code") were all the rage. I haven't heard about them
41 in a while, so I guess they turned out to be research fads? But for a
42 while there, it was all Necula, Necula, Necula. Anyway, I remember at
43 the time looking into TAL and expecting to find something that matched
44 the impression I had pre-formulated about what a "Typed Assembly"
45 might be like. And finding that it didn't match my vision very well.
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47 I don't actually remember what TAL seemed like to me at the time, but
48 what I had in mind was more like SixtyPical.
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50 (I'll also write something about abstract interpretation here at some
51 point, hopefully.)