Pythoniac: Thoughts on a hardware Python processor

[Johannes Nix]

Richard Jones <rjones at ekit-inc.com> wrote in message > 

> Ooh... from there I found:
> 
>   http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.html
> 


In the early 80ties, the UCSD Pascal system was based on a virtual
stack machine, the P-Machine, resulting in a highly portable operating
system which was itself written in Pascal. I remember that in some
German computer magazine, a hardware implementation, the P-engine was
discussed.

I wonder if it would make sense to modify a Modula-3 compiler so that
the  output runs on a hardware stack machine, and then implement
Python in Modula-3. Modula-3 is an interesting compiled,
strongly-typed language which has some important things in common with
Python. Because of the modularity and safety characteristics of the
language, this would be a very nice thing, I guess. For example, as
there exists automatic garbage collection, no reference counting would
be necessary.

Johannes