On The Kernel Wordset

In implementing the RETRO 12 kernel (called RETRO Core, and defined in image/retro.muri) I had to decide on what functionality would be needed. It was important to me that this be kept clean and minimalistic, as I didn't want to spend a lot of time changing it as time progressed. It's far nicer to code at the higher level, where the RETRO language is fully functional, as opposed to writing more assembly code.

So what made it in?

Primitives

These are words that map directly to Nga instructions.

dup      drop     swap   call   eq?   -eq?   lt?   gt? fetch    store    +      -      *     /mod   and   or xor      shift    push   pop    0;

Memory

fetch-next    store-next    ,    s,

Strings

s:to-number    s:eq?    s:length

Flow Control

choose    if    -if    repeat    again

Compiler & Interpreter

Compiler    Heap        ;       [    ]      Dictionary d:link      d:class     d:xt    d:name      d:add-header class:word  class:primitive     class:data  class:macro sigil::     sigil:#     sigil:& sigil:$ interpret   d:lookup    err:notfound

Assembler

i           d           r

I could slightly reduce this. The $ sigil could be defined in higher level code, and I don't strictly need to expose the fetch-next and store-next here. But since the are already implemented as dependencies of the words in the kernel, it would be a bit wasteful to redefine them later in higher level code.

A recent change was the addition of the assembler into the kernel. This allows the higher levels to use assembly as needed, which gives more flexibility and allows for more optimal code in the standard library.

With these words the rest of the language can be built up. Note that the RETRO kernel does not provide any I/O words. It's assumed that the RETRO interfaces will add these as best suited for the systems they run on.

There is another small bit. All images start with a few key pointers in fixed offsets of memory. These are:

| Offset | Contains                    | | ------ | --------------------------- | | 0      | lit call nop nop            | | 1      | Pointer to main entry point | | 2      | Dictionary                  | | 3      | Heap                        | | 4      | RETRO version identifier    |

An interface can use the dictionary pointer and knowledge of the dictionary format for a specific RETRO version to identify the location of essential words like interpret and err:notfound when implementing the user facing interface.