I was contacted by an fellow computer enthusiast who goes by ender_scythe to create a computer that could execute code written in the language he had written, which he had called 'stackish'.

Nothing too out of the ordinary, but what caught my eye about this one is the nature of this esoteric computer language.

For one, it's very low level: no variable declaration or expressions... not even any labeled loops or functions. The language works with what is essentially assembly.

What was even more interesting is the way it goes about it's calculations. The reason why mr. scythe calls his language 'stackish' is because all operations revolve around the stack.



I won't go into too much detail here, (though maybe I should, since mr. scythes website is down, and for all we know I have the last remaining copy of his documentation) but pretty much all commands do one of 3 things:
1) push a value onto the stack.
2) pop a value off the stack, and automatically push it onto what he calls the popped stack.
3) unpop values from the popped stack.

examples of these operations are:
0-9 Pushes this number into the stack.
+ Pop the last two values and add.
j Pop last value and jump to that character number.
. Pop last value into standard output
/ Swap last two numbers on the stack.
q Pop last value from the popped stack into the stack.

The list goes on, and there are 28 commands in total, though more info can be found here.

Since the language is, for all intents and purposes, so close to the metal, and the supposed architecture is definitely unique, I figured making a computer to run this code might make for an interesting adventure.



So here marks the beginning of a new project, let's see what we make of it, shall we?