The inner loop of HP's RPL interpreter

Topics relating to various Forth models on the 6502, 65816, and related microprocessors and microcontrollers.
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BigEd
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The inner loop of HP's RPL interpreter

Post by BigEd »

This article from the hpmuseum forum will be of interest, I think, to students and practitioners of threaded interpreter writing:
Quote:
RPL, the threaded interpreted language used on HP's Saturn based calculators since the HP-18C, was developed by William C. Wickes back around 1983 to 1984. Some of the information in this article is available from the journal article "RPL: A Mathematical Control Language" by William C. Wickes, published in "Programming Environments", Institute for Applied Forth Research, Inc., 1988.
I can't say I've understood it yet!
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jdb2
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Re: The inner loop of HP's RPL interpreter

Post by jdb2 »

Hello :) I'm the author of the referenced article. It's currently only in draft form and I've been updating and editing it to make it clearer and more understandable. If there's any ambiguity, mistakes or anything that causes confusion or isn't clear enough, please let me know :)

I next plan on adding a bunch of diagrams to the article which should improve its understandability :)

Regards,

jdb2
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BigEd
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Re: The inner loop of HP's RPL interpreter

Post by BigEd »

Oh, welcome! And thanks for writing and publishing your document.

Diagrams certainly help me!
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jdb2
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Re: The inner loop of HP's RPL interpreter

Post by jdb2 »

BigEd wrote:
Oh, welcome! And thanks for writing and publishing your document.

Diagrams certainly help me!
You're certainly welcome! :D

I'll probably add ASCII art diagrams first as I'm unfamiliar with Inkscape which I'm using to draw the graphical diagrams and I'm pulling my hair out over things not going right in Inkscape :)

jdb2
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BigEd
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Re: The inner loop of HP's RPL interpreter

Post by BigEd »

Good plan - I like a bit of ASCII art. We had a thread collecting suitable tools:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3109
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jdb2
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Re: The inner loop of HP's RPL interpreter

Post by jdb2 »

BigEd wrote:
Good plan - I like a bit of ASCII art. We had a thread collecting suitable tools:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3109
Thanks for the link :)

A day or so ago I performed a major rework / edit on the article to fix style issues and to make it clearer and more understandable guided by some suggestions from other HP Museum forum members ( I also added some more information ). I'll next be adding ASCII "graphics" :P first as I'm using Inkscape for the images but I'm in the process of learning how to use Inkscape.

jdb2
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