Re: Constructed Computer Architectures (Concomps?)

On Sun, 8 Feb 2009 15:44:05 -0500, Paul Bennett <paul.w.bennett@...>
wrote:

>Where does the design of imaginary computer architectures (and programming
>languages) stand in the ranks of con-somethinging?
[...]
>Anyone else ever dug into that sort of stuff?
I've done some of this kinda stuff; never for a conculture or anything,
though.  On the 'actually meant to be usable' side I've put together an
architecture or two for genetic programming experiments.  And some on the
'simply doodling' side: one time in eighth grade I just wrote down, start to
finish, 256 opcodes for a hypothetical 8-bit processor in a fallow moment.
I subsequently tinkered with that one a bit more, putting in things I didn't
think of beforehand and implementing an emulator, but it never reached the
stage where one might look upon it and think it sensibly designed.

Have had a few ideas for esoteric proglangs too -- one where operators are
permutations and you apply them by anagramming the name of your variable or
whatever; one that's hard to do justice to in a sentence but where every
instruction forked the executing environment (which only had one register)
in two with predetermined next addresses, and the challenge would be
arranging things so that the graph of execution flow connected up right --
but never fleshed them out.

Alex