Daily Note - 2024-11-24
Hey, I'm Hanno! These are my daily notes on Crosscut, the programming language I'm creating. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please get in touch!
This note was published before Crosscut was called Crosscut! If it refers to "Caterpillar", that is the old name, just so you know.
So what about the efficiency of
using micro-instructions as undo instructions?
Let's get back to our example, the expression 1 2 +
which translates to the instructions push
1
, push 2
, add
. We
can undo the add
with pop
, push 1
, push
2
, the push 2
with a pop
, and the push 1
with another
pop
.
So pop
, push 1
, push
2
, pop
, pop
. Five
micro-instructions to undo three regular ones; pretty
much the same as before. This does not seem any more
efficient. But remember, there are far fewer
micro-instructions than regular instructions. So their
encoding can be more compact. Those five wouldn't take
up a lot of bytes.
Is this the best approach? I don't know. But it seems like the best bet for an initial attempt, for the implementation simplicity alone.