[Liverpool] Talk Proposals

[Simon Johnson]

Hello everyone,

About a month ago I said I was planning to do a talk on simulating computers
in Python. Most people said there's no way I'd have that done in a month and
they were right!! In fact, I'm probably further away from having a useful
talk than I was last month :)

It turns out that as you get in to the nuts and bolts of trying to simulate
the circuitry of a computer using software that there is rather a lot to it.
As you might expect, the circuit is pretty complicated.

The upshot of this is that to try and communicate how the whole circuit
works in a single 40 minute slot is pretty tough. Instead I would like to do
two talks.

In the first talk I'm going to focus on the circuitry of the machine. The
outline is given below. Rather than tackling the whole circuit, I'm going to
focus on a few interesting parts of the circuit.

   - A brief, high-level description of the computer and its parts.
   - The ALU - the bit that does the computation.
   - The program counter.
   - A simple memory circuit.
   - An overview of the input and output devices.

At the end of the talk we'll have a little program running on the machine
that says: "Hello World!"

In the second talk, I'll walk through the steps required to build a compiler
that targets the machine. The initial plan is to make a "Python-like"
language that compiles down to machine code for the simple computer I've put
together.

What do you think?

Cheers,

Simon
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