> >no write/interpret cycle at all.
>
> Cool.
>
> There's plenty of VMs around, varying from simulators for everything
> from the Apollo guidance computer (!) through PDP-8s to Z80s and PPC
> chips, to modrn runtimes like Parrot and the CLR. I hear Spectrum
> emulators are a favourite for washing machines, but I digress. :-)
Yeah, thats the sort of thing I had in mind. Most speccy emulators I've seen
are just huge switch statements with 256 cases, it would be cool to start with
something like that - or even more esoteric like a guidence system!
> A VM designed for live music hacking could have midi or sound ops,
> score operations, etc. as part of the instruction set. The registers,
> cache and memory could all be structures to support this. You could
> indeed hack that live at the machine code level, or have a higher-
> level language that interprets or compiles to it.
no high level languages - I'm actually thinking of a visual version of asm (so
each instruction has an icon that you can stack up) or something... so your
microcode statements form visuals which create the music.
I haven't thought it through properly yet as you can probably tell.
> Prolog, Lisp, Java, Perl, Interactive Fiction and various other
> games all have their own VMs or even hardware machine
> implementations. Having a VM encapsulates the conceptual model of
> the language or the task, adding expressive power or aiding
> optimisation. This is a very important and popular technique.
>
> >For the ultra livecoding geek - it may be possible to get your head round a
> >real system without a virtual machine in simpler 8bit computers, or
> >microprocessors that allow code to be modified.
>
> Use a keyboard to generate bytecodes, playing the instructions live.
> A postmodern version of the old flip-switches and blinking lights
> seen on old computers (especially in films). :-)
This sort of thing starts to approach circuit bending in it's ethics, which I
consider a good thing - software bending?
dave
Received on Fri Sep 10 2004 - 14:12:50 BST