On Jun 30, 2006, at 11:25 AM, Daniel C. wrote:
How hard would it be to pick up a handfull of Atmel chips (probably
the 8051's) and a programmer for them and make them execute Lisp code?
http://www.atmel.com/products/8051/
Anyone have any experience with this?
I don't personally have experience with this, but I've read a bit
about Lisp Machines.
Those 8051s are microcontroller chips, which means they're CPUs with
general purpose instruction sets designed for embedded systems. In
other words, making them execute Lisp code is essentially the same
process as making a desktop CPU execute Lisp code. You write a Lisp
interpreter or compiler for the chip, and there you go.
Lisp Machines, on the other hand, had instruction sets and CPU
architectures optimized for Lisp features. Typically a lot of the
higher-level instructions were microcoded rather than being fully
hardware-defined. There are some papers describing how they were
designed, as well as some more recent designs for Lisp and Scheme
CPUs, out there just a google search away.
There are also a few Lisp Machine emulators that you might want to
check out.
If you really want to build your own Lisp machine, the cheapest/
easiest way would be to create it in a FPGA. There are some
companies like Microtronics that make little development boards with
FPGA-based CPUs. This would involve a lot of research and
programming work to complete, and there would be no performance
benefit over Lisp on a fast general-purpose CPU.
--Levi
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