Fungus is a prototype hardware specification of a Funge machine, a microcodable CPU capable of interpreting funges at the (macrocode) machine code level. Why? Well, so far we've had Lisp machines and Fortran machines and these days, right about everything is a C machine. I want a funge machine (don't worry, the doctors tell me I harmless). This is based on an incomplete paper describing the architecture. It's perverted, it's baroque, it's vector-based, it's 18 bits wide and it was originally available in PDF. Here it is, in all its glory. If you think this is extreme, remember they were thinking about Java machines for a while.

I'm recoding the full text of the paper (scroll down to get it) in HTML so it can be placed here. It's complex work, since LaTeX is better at producing documents than HTML, but I'm almost done.

Abstract

The Funge family of programming languages consists of a group of n-dimensional, stack-based programming languages. The most prominent and original member of the family, Befunge (a two-dimensional language), was invented in 1993 by Chris Pressey. The Funge family is Turing-Complete, yet was designed to be ‘a nightmare to compile’. Considering the author is aware of two compilers for Befunge, it would be reasonable to claim that Funge programmers are at home with nightmares. This paper describes Fungus, an architecture designed and optimised for Funge. It is hoped that this will give rise to further nightmares, possibly involving Cthulhu in a bikini teaching INTERCAL to first-year law students.

Fungus is a microcoded, 18-bit, two-dimensional extreme RISC machine extremely suited to the interpretation of Funge at the hardware level. The author visualises the implementation of Funge compilers to generate Fungus-native code. The reader to whom the concept of Cthulhu in a bikini sounds acceptable may additionally visualise optimising Funge compilers for Fungus (in which case, the image of a lecture theatre full of future lawyers should be considered).

Fungus: the Funge Machine (PDF)Download this file. (165 KBytes)