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The Mouse Programming Language on CP/M

by harryvederci on 8/30/24, 1:13 PM with 14 comments

  • by whartung on 9/2/24, 1:28 PM

    I actually own the book for this language. Found it in an obscure corner of the local technical bookstore. It was not placed with all of the other computer books.

    Just picked it up because of my fascination with programming languages.

  • by ChuckMcM on 9/2/24, 7:40 PM

    Nice! Takes me down memory lane when my very first computer was a "Digital Group" Z-80 system I built from a kit with 10K of RAM! (8K memory board + 2K on the CPU board). Mouse was a faster and more compact than Tiny BASIC. It was also slightly less brain bending than Forth :-). I'll have to put it on my emulated IMSAI 8080.

    It is fun to note the number of models of small languages that emerged from the early days of computing which would all fit in the L1 cache of a current processor. But they could also be used as an interesting way of doing GPU/APU macros. When I worked at Intel I implemented a simple interpreter like this to drive the compute element of the 82786 graphics chip that Intel had produced. As that 'engine' didn't have much stack support my interpreter was more like Mouse than Forth. It let me write simple exerciser tests for the chip like "fill a window region with a pattern" or "do cookie cutter blits between two regions."

    I also find it fun when students learn a language like this and suddenly internalize the difference between "programming" and "computation". We joke you can write Fortran in any language but that joke is funny for me because it expressed the difference between someone who was programming by 'pattern matching' and people who were programming by 'expressing computation through language elements.' (yeah it sounds kind of snooty but it isn't, it is the difference between algorithms which can be expressed in any language vs using the statements of known programming language to similarly express that algorihm in a different language). The more ways you learn to express something I feel like the better you understand what is part of the algorithm vs what is part of the language syntax.

  • by actionfromafar on 9/2/24, 11:54 AM

    This is a cool little language, seemingly deserving ports to other CPUs than Z80.

  • by mikewarot on 9/2/24, 5:04 PM

    It seems like forth, with a lot of chopping to get the size down, and greatly simplify parsing.

    However... it doesn't have stack manipulation, a dictionary, or the ability to handle strings in any fashion.

    It's a cute little language, you can solve a lot of problems with it, but it's not the Forth you're looking for. ;-)

  • by pgris2 on 9/2/24, 1:39 PM

    Honestly, a port to a modern architecture, with more standard looking characters (like using # for comments instead of ~ and \n for newline instead of ! ) would be pretty interesting... It's amazing what that people used to be able to do with such limitations. 2k! I can barely make a CRUD app fit in 2G

  • by IamDaedalus on 9/2/24, 2:04 PM

    oh cool mouse! I wrote a very small interpreter (incomplete) for a build what you want capstone project. almost everyone wrote a website or some web app but I chose to write this in C and it was one of the projects I had a lot of fun on I'll actually go back and complete it

  • by zabzonk on 9/2/24, 1:07 PM

    don't see why you would you would use this over FORTH, which is IMHO much more readable and widely available on CP/M - or you can easily write your own.

  • by hggh on 9/2/24, 1:59 PM

    (2020)