
UNCOL: Universal Computer Oriented Language (2013) - breck
http://www.osdata.com/topic/language/uncol.htm
======
olodus
Isn't this almost what LLVM is doing - creating a common instruction set for
language designers to target and which compiles to a large amount of machines?
Sry if it is stupid question. I'm interested in programming language design
but are still very much learning the ropes. I might have misunderstood the
real problem LLVM or this wants to solve.

~~~
thechao
It's the same idea, yes. Although, the specification of UNCOL is... a little
odd. It has a bunch of cells (referenced by address); instructions refer to a
previous instruction, and an address for their arguments---so like a stack
machine, but the second argument is always a pointer. Or ... some such thing.
The one paper I read spends 80% of its effort defining the representation of
_text_.

~~~
msla
> The one paper I read spends 80% of its effort defining the representation of
> _text_.

These days, an equivalent effort would incorporate Unicode and UTF-8 by
reference, which together amount to much more verbiage, especially Unicode.
Back then, text standards weren't quite so mature, and it's possible nothing
existing at the time really solved their problem.

------
glangdale
One of my fonder memories of graduate school is looking up one of the original
UNCOL citations. When I went looking for the 1958 paper that everyone kept
citing, in the dustier portions of the stacks, it wasn't there. I think
someone had mistyped the cite to Strong et al in an earlier paper and the
broken citation had been copied from paper to paper (possibly without ever
reading the original).

