t3x/t3x9r3-extended/t3x-history.txt

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2022-05-12 13:47:58 +00:00
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE T3X LANGUAGE
T3X is a tiny block-structured language that you probably
haven't heard about. It had a tiny community back in the
mid-1990's. Software written in T3X includes its own compiler
(of course), its own text-based IDE, a few LISP interpreters,
an assembler and linker for the 8086, and a database system
used by a local church community. It was also used in a few
college courses, most probably because its community was so
tiny that nobody could be bothered to do your homework
assignments for you.
The T3X language started as a very minimalistic language
with a single-file compiler that targeted the 8086 and 386
processors. It supported FreeBSD via the GNU binutils and
emitted DOS EXE files through its own assembler and linker.
In its lifetime, several enhancements were made to both the
language and its implementation:
- An object system was added to the language, and the entire
runtime support infrastructure was rewritten as a set of
classes.
- Tcode, an abstract target language, was added. It could be
interpreted, optimized, linked, and converted to native
code.
- A back-end for the AXP 21064 (Alpha) was added.
- A C back-end was added, allowing to use T3X on otherwise
unsupported processors.
- Runtime support for the following platforms was added:
NetBSD-386, NetBSD-Alpha, FreeBSD-386, Coherent-386,
Linux-386, and Plan 9 (via C).
T3X is probably notable, because it is a typeless object
oriented language. Objects are distinguished by the methods
they implement, and the methods are typeless procedures.
The T3X object system is more similar to ADA packages than
to the C++ or Java approach. It implements reusable modules
rather than data types.
T3X-8.1.7 was the last version of T3X and it was released in
2004 with some minor updates in 2011 and 2014. Its generic
(Tcode) port still runs on modern operating systems.
T3X9 is a subset of the T3X language that compiles directly
from T3X to ELF-FreeBSD-386.
If you are familiar with T3X, this is what the compiler omits
from the original language: modules, objects, classes, packed
vectors, function pointers and indirect function calls, meta
commands, unsigned operators. Also, constant expression syntax
is only a subset.
The T3X9 compiler is under 1600 lines in size and compiles
itself from source to ELF in about 0.06 seconds on a 750MHz
notebook computer. The resulting binary has a size of less
than 32K bytes. The T3X9r2 compiler has a slightly larger
size (about 33K bytes) and additional language constructs
(packed tables, hex literal prefixes) and runtime functions.