Re: [Tack-devel] Trouble Installing ACK

[David G. <dg...@co...>]

Arun Ramachandran wrote:
[...]
> I am involved in a project to build a backend for a forth based
> microprocessor. Since I am new to compiler design, my project guide has=

> suggested use of ACK as it has a stack based intermediate representatio=
n
> EM.

Very cool; what sort of processor is it? Commercial or self-developed? At=
 one
point I wrote a code generator (for a proprietry operating system, ask me=
 for
a boring lecture) for the PSC1000 (ne=E9 ShBoom), which was... interestin=
g. It
had two stacks, a weird instruction encoding scheme was varied depending =
where
the instruction was in memory, one and a half processor cores, about 40% =
of a
floating point unit, and sank without trace. I'm not sure they even paid =
us.

He's right, in that EM would make a good choice. EM does assume that the
equivalent of 'n pick' is very cheap, and will do it a lot, but you could=

probably map most EM instructions onto one or two Forth primitives...

[...]
> I am trying to install ACK in my linux system. Here is what I have
> done...
[...]
> cd $SRC_HOME
> find . -type d -perm -555 -print > $CONFIG/dir_list
[...]
> Could you please confirm that "perm -555" is indeed the correct option?=


I will be honest and admit that I have absolutely no idea what that means=
=2E

When I first got hold of the ACK CVS repository, I did spend some time an=
d
managed to beat the build system into behaving reasonably well on Linux, =
and I
don't know why it would fail on your system --- although it might be wort=
h
playing with your default umask settings.

The old build system is incomprehensible, labyrinthine, and would give
M.C.Escher a fit. I'm a little scared to look into it too deeply in case =
I
find one of the Elder Gods looking back at me... since then, I've been wo=
rking
on a new and improved build system that ought to be a whole lot easier to=
 cope
with. It's not complete, but builds all the code generators and optimiser=
s and
the ANSI C, K&R C and Pascal front ends, so it ought to suffice for what =
you
want; I'm still working on it. If you're interested in giving this a try,=
 look
back in the mailing list archives for a message titled 'CVS update' for
instructions. I'd appreciate any feedback.

(Apart from anything else, the old build system does not support incremen=
tal
builds --- or at least, I've never found any way of making it do one --- =
and
so would be an exercise in frustration for actually doing development on.=
)

--=20
+- David Given --McQ-+ "Gaping from its single obling socket was
|  dg...@co...    | scintillating, many fauceted scarlet emerald..."
| (dg...@ta...) | --- Jim Theis, _The Eye of Argon_ (spelling
+- www.cowlark.com --+ original)