The TONS Assembler

In order for developers to be able to run code (to develop and debug the virtual machine, the scheduler, etc.), a small assembler was developed. This assembler translates a pseudo-assembly language into TONS bytecode, that can be executed by the TONS daemon.

A small program that calculates the n'th Fibonacci number, looks like:

;;
;; Fibonacci caluclator
;;
;; f(n) =    f(n-1)+f(n-2)    if n > 2
;;      =    n                otherwise
;;
entry "fib"
        decl integer,   ; r0
             integer,   ; r1
             integer,   ; r2
             integer    ; r3
        cmpgt r0, a0, 2
        branch r0
         move r1, a0
         decr r1
         call r2, "fib", r1
         decr r1
         call r3, "fib", r1
         add r2, r3          
         return r2
        else
         return a0
        end
     end

This snippet should give you an idea about what the TASM language is like. This is for developers only. It is possible to crash the TONS daemon by writing malicious code, and the language is far too inconvenient for any user to be troubled with.
But, until the TAL compiler starts evolving, this is what we have to work with. And it definitely is possible to write quite non-trivial programs using TASM. We just don't want the users to go thru that :-)

The TONS project is hosted by Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group.

This page was last modified by Kenneth Geisshirt March 28, 1999.