The Mouse Programming Language on CP/M

I actually own the book for this language. Found it in an obscure corner of the local technical bookstore. It was not placed with all of the other computer books.<p>Just picked it up because of my fascination with programming languages.

Nice! Takes me down memory lane when my very first computer was a &quot;Digital Group&quot; Z-80 system I built from a kit with 10K of RAM! (8K memory board + 2K on the CPU board). Mouse was a faster and more compact than Tiny BASIC. It was also slightly less brain bending than Forth :-). I&#x27;ll have to put it on my emulated IMSAI 8080.<p>It is fun to note the number of models of small languages that emerged from the early days of computing which would all fit in the L1 cache of a current processor. But they could also be used as an interesting way of doing GPU&#x2F;APU macros. When I worked at Intel I implemented a simple interpreter like this to drive the compute element of the 82786 graphics chip that Intel had produced. As that &#x27;engine&#x27; didn&#x27;t have much stack support my interpreter was more like Mouse than Forth. It let me write simple exerciser tests for the chip like &quot;fill a window region with a pattern&quot; or &quot;do cookie cutter blits between two regions.&quot;<p>I also find it fun when students learn a language like this and suddenly internalize the difference between &quot;programming&quot; and &quot;computation&quot;. We joke you can write Fortran in any language but that joke is funny for me because it expressed the difference between someone who was programming by &#x27;pattern matching&#x27; and people who were programming by &#x27;expressing computation through language elements.&#x27; (yeah it sounds kind of snooty but it isn&#x27;t, it is the difference between algorithms which can be expressed in any language vs using the statements of known programming language to similarly express that algorihm in a different language). The more ways you learn to express something I feel like the better you understand what is part of the algorithm vs what is part of the language syntax.

This is a cool little language, seemingly deserving ports to other CPUs than Z80.

It <i>seems</i> like forth, with a lot of chopping to get the size down, and greatly simplify parsing.<p>However... it doesn&#x27;t have stack manipulation, a dictionary, or the ability to handle strings in any fashion.<p>It&#x27;s a cute little language, you can solve a lot of problems with it, but it&#x27;s not the Forth you&#x27;re looking for. ;-)

Honestly, a port to a modern architecture, with more standard looking characters (like using # for comments instead of ~ and \n for newline instead of ! ) would be pretty interesting... It&#x27;s amazing what that people used to be able to do with such limitations. 2k! I can barely make a CRUD app fit in 2G

oh cool mouse! I wrote a very small interpreter (incomplete) for a build what you want capstone project. almost everyone wrote a website or some web app but I chose to write this in C and it was one of the projects I had a lot of fun on I&#x27;ll actually go back and complete it

don&#x27;t see why you would you would use this over FORTH, which is IMHO much more readable and widely available on CP&#x2F;M - or you can easily write your own.

(2020)