Re: Back to basics

Daniel Veillard (veillard@rufus.w3.org)
Thu, 26 Feb 1998 18:07:59 -0500


> What the hell is MIX ?
>
> MIX is the machine invented by Prof. Knuth in his famous "The Art of
> Computer Programming" series. All the examples in these fantastic books
> are written in the MIX assembly.

Hey, have you noticed the MMIX project:

http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.html

He is updating his processor for next book updates. An interesting
piece of (virtual) hardware !

: MMIX is a machine that operates primarily on 64-bit words.
: It has 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers

No problem of register pressure :-) I guess there is more
space in the register file of MMIX than in MIX main memory !

: The designers of important real-world processor chips
: (e.g., MIPS and ALPHA) are helping me with the design of MMIX

Sound that the brazillian guys will have a project ready for
next years:

: Call for volunteers

: All of the MIX programs in Volumes 1--3 will need to be rewritten
: in MMIX, before I finish the ``ultimate'' edition of those volumes
: that I plan to write after Volume 5 is completed. The current target
: date for the ultimate volumes is the year 2011,

Any taker ?

Daniel