Basic Interpreter

agilm4

New Member
A lot of people complain about 2 things with the PICAXE's - speed and storage. Recently, the topic came up for an interpreter for an externaa eeprom and eventually evolved into using PIC24's and dsPIC's.

Why don't you just type a simple interpreter in BASIC (i.e. read eeprom, jump to function, loop forever), transfer to ASM and program into a PIC24. You could even add a download fuction that could use the PICAXE editor to download a program to an external eeprom.

I'm sorry about this - i must confess, I'm new to the whole chip thing, and don't know if I'm overstepping it or not, but the idea of a super-fast PICAXE is too good to resist.
 

agilm4

New Member
A compiler changes the code from one language to another, usually from a higher level language to a lower one e.g. BASIC to ASM, then ASM to HEX. this is done before it is programmed in to the chip - when the code is finally executed, it is in the native language.

An interpreter just changes the code from a text file to a series of tokens that represent the commands, loads these into the chip, and when they are executed code already inside the chip or included with the download looks them up in a table, jumps to the address specified and exectues the native code here. So essentially, it is the same as compiling, but it doesn't actually execute your code, it executes code already in the chip using the info you pass to it. Noticeably slower, although aloows you to use pre-programmed routines (i2c, etc.).

If there's a harder and less concise way to explain it without cut+pasting it from wikipedia, I don't know it- that's something I will need to Goo (oooooooo... [breathe] ooooo...) gle)

Edited by - agilm4 on 24/08/2007 09:38:28
 
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