Bob for RISC OS

Armbob is a small object-oriented programming language, based on David Betz's Bob 1.5. For a description of Bob and its raison d'être see A tiny object-oriented language in Dr Dobb's Journal, September 1991, p.26. David Betz kindly gave his permission for me to make ArmBob available to RISC OS users, and expressed interest in a platform that was unfamiliar to him.

Bob has evolved into an elegant OOP language, the latest update being from 24/05/05. Its original sources can be fetched from here. I have compiled these for RISC OS with a minimum of necessary changes to keep the Norcroft C compiler happy. You can download them here:

zip archive
Bob (24/05/05)
The implementation of the bytecode interpreter cries out for optimization for running on ARM CPUs. At present code is represented simply as a stream of bytes, which are read one by one. An obvious improvement is to fetch bytes four at a time, and to use right-shifts by 8 bits. A zero byte would cause a new 4-byte word to be fetched. This would require labels to be at word-aligned addresses. I suggest this as an interesting project for ARM-loving code-botherers, among whom I may possibly be counted.

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