• PLASMA 2.1 Released

    From D Finnigan@21:1/5 to All on Tue Feb 20 22:10:51 2024
    Dave Schmenk writes:

    A great number of performance and reliability improvements. The big feature update is PLFORTH, a FORTH language module for PLASMA that makes FORTH a
    first class citizen to the PLASMA environment. Many on-the-metal programming tools for software development or use PLASMA as a command line interface
    with a full suite of file manipulation tools and program launcher.

    VMs for 64K 6502, 128K 6502, and 128K 65802/65816 including a JIT compiler
    for on-the-fly bytecode -> machine code translation. Floating point
    operations by way of the 80 bit extended SANE (Standard Apple Numerics Environment) library.

    Check it out:
    https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA?tab=readme-ov-file

    =====

    About PLASMA

    PLASMA is a medium level programming language targeting the 8-bit 6502 processor. Historically, there were simple languages developed in the early years of computers that improved on the tedium of assembly language
    programming while still being low level enough for system coding. Languages like B, FORTH, and PLASMA fall into this category.

    PLASMA is a combination of operating environment, virtual machine, and assembler/compiler matched closely to the 6502 architecture. It is an
    attempt to satisfy a few challenges surrounding code size, efficient
    execution, small runtime and flexible code location. By architecting a
    unique bytecode that maps nearly one-to-one to the higher-level
    representation, the compiler can be very simple and execute quickly on the Apple II for a self-hosted environment. A modular approach provides for incremental development and code reuse. The syntax of the language is
    heavily influenced by assembly, Pascal, and C. The design philosophy was to
    be as simple as feasible while retaining flexibility and semantic clarity.
    You won't find any unnecessary or redundant syntax in PLASMA.

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  • From D Finnigan@21:1/5 to All on Tue Mar 19 13:30:37 2024
    A few weeks ago, Dave Schmenk issued version 2.11 of PLASMA. This release
    has a minor update to load modules generated by EDASM with 8 bit fixups. ll modules up to now have been generated by PLASM and only use 16 bit fixups. Mostly useful for future modules built with EDASM. Check out the Assembly Language Toolkit.

    Check it out: https://github.com/dschmenk/PLASMA

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