Re: An assortment of questions

[Paul Brook <paul at codesourcery dot com>]

> The machine is very strange in modern terms. ?It doesn't have registers, it
> executes code in reverse Polish, the integer data type is a degenerate form
> of the floating point data type, pointers are magic, there are no page
> tables, and the word size isn't a power of 2, just to start. ?Oh, and the
> integers (floating point mantissas with exponent of zero) are
> sign/magnitude. ?And boolean quantities are even/odd, rather than
> zero/nonzero.
>...
> Does it seem feasible to be able to add a new math data type and still
> expect things to work?  Or is this a 'flat impossibility'?  Any pointers on
> what I should start looking at in the compiler?

It's unclear whether you're trying to generate code to run on this machine, or 
have gcc accept binaries for this machine as a "sourse" language, or both.

If you're trying to generate code for this machine, then I have to ask why. 
You mention that you're running on an emulator anyway, so why not just run 
new code directly for the machine running the emulator, which is persumably a 
vaguely sane architecture.

If you're trying to use gcc as a binary translator (ie. feeding the original 
binaries in and getting something a native application out) then I would 
seriously consider writing a translator that generates C or C++, then feeding 
that through a normal compiler.

Either way, it doesn't sound like hacking gcc is worth the effort. I find it 
hard to believe that people are actually writing new code for such a bizarre 
machine.

Paul