Crosscut

Daily Thought - 2024-11-24

Hey, I'm Hanno! These are my daily thoughts on Crosscut, the programming language I'm creating. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please get in touch!

This thought was published before Crosscut was called Crosscut! If it refers to "Caterpillar", that is the old name, just so you know.

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So what about the efficiency of using micro-instructions as undo instructions? Let's get back to our example, the expression 1 2 + which translates to the instructions push 1, push 2, add. We can undo the add with pop, push 1, push 2, the push 2 with a pop, and the push 1 with another pop.

So pop, push 1, push 2, pop, pop. Five micro-instructions to undo three regular ones; pretty much the same as before. This does not seem any more efficient. But remember, there are far fewer micro-instructions than regular instructions. So their encoding can be more compact. Those five wouldn't take up a lot of bytes.

Is this the best approach? I don't know. But it seems like the best bet for an initial attempt, for the implementation simplicity alone.

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