Thus far we have used and studied only one form of existence of our programs, namely the native Tela source code (t-files and command line). Both internally and externally, programs exist in other forms too. Here is a complete list of all code representations in Tela:
- t-code (the native Tela code) - "TreeCode" (internal representation for t-code) - "FlatCode" (another internal representation for t-code) - C-tela code (code similar to C++) - Compiled object code (machine language)
When a program is source'd ( source ) in or when a command line is typed, a lexical analyzer first breaks it in tokens, that is, keywords, separators, numbers, identifiers etc. The output of the lexical analyzer is a stream of tokens without hierarchical structure. A parser continues to produce a treelike representation, the TreeCode. The TreeCode is no longer a stream but has structure in it. TreeCode is immediately translated into FlatCode, which is a sequence of virtual machine instructions that the Tela kernel can understand, and it is reminiscent to assembly language. You can see both TreeCode and FlatCode representations of your input by setting the VerboseMode on:
>VerboseMode(on)
0
>1 + 2.3*pi
BLOCK[SET[PLUS[1,TIMES[2.3,pi]]],NOP]
Source file: "stdin"
no input args, no output args, no locals, stack frame size 1.
Maximum number of operands is 3.
0 MUL $0,2.3,pi
4 INC $0
6 PRI $0
8.22566
Alternatively, you can invoke Tela with the --verbose or -v flag. The FlatCode of any source'd ( source source ) function can be seen by using disasm ( source source disasm ):
>disasm(mean) Disassembly of 'mean', Source file: "std.t" 1 input arg, 1 output arg, no locals, stack frame size 4. Maximum number of operands is 4. 0 CALL sum,1,$3,$1 5 CALL length,1,$0,$1 10 DIV $2,$3,$0
The definition of mean is
function y = mean(x)
// mean(x) computes the arithmetic mean of a numeric array x.
{
y=sum(x)/length(x)
};
and you can easily guess what each of the FlatCode instructions do.
C-tela code is another way to write new functions for Tela. Many Tela builtin functions are written in C-tela; those which are not are either in native t-code or are so-called intrinsic functions (meaning that they generate virtual machine instructions directly like macros). C-tela code can be compiled into object files using the program telakka ( source source disasm telakka ). The object files can be either statically or dynamically linked with the rest of the Tela kernel.
There exists a standard function t2ct ( source source disasm telakka t2ct ) to translate t-code into C-tela code. The conversion is made possible by the fact each FlatCode instruction can be made to correspond simple C-tela codings. As of this writing, however, the Tela compiling scheme is still somewhat incomplete and under development. When it is fully functional, you can go all the way from t-code down to object code automatically.
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