commit 929cce6fb9a9e5c06dc1ee46e486155076cfb9e2
parent f51142097f19a02353349fbaad6bbc424ff1e791
Author: viznut_web <viznut_web@web>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2022 14:10:31 +0200
empty web commit
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1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/stack-based.mdwn b/stack-based.mdwn
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-Stack machines are arguably the simplest kind of computer architecture. Their LIFO structure is quite suitable for block-oriented languages. The code size for a stack machine can be very compact because most instructions have no operand field.
+**Stack machines** are arguably the simplest kind of computer architecture. Their LIFO structure is quite suitable for block-oriented languages. The code size for a stack machine can be very compact because most instructions have no operand field.
-## Primitives
+[[Forth]] (from around 1970) is perhaps the most succesful stack-based programming language, based on a machine model consisting of a data stack and a return stack. Stack-oriented languages are a large subset of concatenative programming language (with the Om language being a rare example of a non-stack-oriented concatenative programming language).
+
+Many [[virtual machine]]s used as compilation targets of higher-level programming languages ([[Java]], [[Lua]], etc.) are stack-based.
+
+History
+-------
+
+Reverse Polish notation was separately invented since the 1950s by several matematicians and computer scientists. GEORGE (1957) was the first practical programming language based on RPN.
+
+Stack-based instruction sets were used by many mainframe computers of the early 1960s (notably, the Burroughs B5000 and the English Electric KDF9), but the idea was later marginalized by register-based architectures such as the IBM S/360. Still, some later stack-based computers (such as [[Niklaus Wirth]]'s Lilith) proved to be quite competitive in terms of speed, particularly thanks to the high code density that reduced their need for memory bandwidth.
+
+Example
+-------
+
+Primitives:
* POP Remove an item at index, closing the hole left in the stack.
* ROLL Remove an item at index, push it on top of the stack.
