Hello everyone,<br><br>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 :)<br>
<br>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.<br><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br><ul><li>
A brief, high-level description of the computer and its parts.<br></li><li>The ALU - the bit that does the computation.</li><li>The program counter.</li><li>A simple memory circuit.</li><li>An overview of the input and output devices.</li>
</ul>At the end of the talk we'll have a little program running on the machine that says: "Hello World!"<br><br>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.<br>
<br>What do you think?<br><br>Cheers,<br><br>Simon <br><br><br><br>