Hacking the NES With Lisp

Andy Hefner has a detailed blog post covering his quest to program an NES with the assistance of Common Lisp. He developed a new 6502 assembler, a mini-language for composing musical sequences, and a neat demo (rom image).

Comments

This is what Slashdot needs more of

[comrade k]

Bravo, Slashdot. This is the kind of stuff that the geek crowd finds interesting. Is it useful? Nope. Is it cool and borderline bizarre? Yep!

Re:a strange mix of nausea and admiration

[ratboy666]

Read the fine article. Using CL does substantially change the language. Specifically, note the higher order manipulation of the eventual low-level program that the author achieved using promises (delayed evaluations). Basically, "threading while assembling".

Also, notice the ease of introducing higher-level flow control constructs (IF and UNTIL) into assembler. And the elimination of a second assembler pass by use of promises for forward references. It's kind of "magic" -- the correct data will be there when it's needed!

In this use-case, CL is a notational system for NES programming. It probably shouldn't be called "assembler" anymore, as the power of CL can be brought to bear in the process of generating the desired machine code.