NAME
mixal - a load-and-go MIX assembler
SYNOPSIS
mixal [ file ... ]
DESCRIPTION
Mixal is an implementation of the hypothetical MIX computer and its
assembly language called MIXAL. The computer was designed by Donald
Knuth for use in his monumental and yet to be finished book series The
Art of Computer Programming. All programs and all programming
exercises in the book are written in the MIXAL language.
This implementation is a load-and-go assembler, meaning that you
provide it with a MIXAL program source, which it translates into MIX
machine code, which it promptly executes by acting as a MIX emulator.
You give Mixal zero or more program source files in the command line,
which the program interprets. If you give it no arguments, it expects
to find a program in the standard input stream. After the program has
executed, the final state of the machine registers are printed to the
standard output stream.
The card punch and line printer devices are connected to the standard
input and output stream, respectively. Console input and output are
connected to standard input and output, and the disk devices are
connected to files named diskN in the current directory, where N is the
device number. Those files are created on demand.
BUGS
This MIXAL implementation does not do floating-point. The tape devices
are not implemented.
AUTHOR
This MIXAL implementation was designed and written by Darius Bacon, and
then ported to Unixish systems and debugged by Eric S. Raymond. This
version includes corrections to multiplication and division by Larry
Gately. This manual page was written for Debian by Antti-Juhani
Kaijanaho, with changes by Darius Bacon.
SEE ALSO
The files /usr/share/doc/mixal/READ.ME and
/usr/share/doc/mixal/NOTES.gz contain some information about this MIXAL
implementation. Be sure to read /usr/share/doc/mixal/README.Debian,
too.
A description of the MIX system and the MIXAL language can be found in
Donald E. Knuthâs book The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 1:
Fundamental Algorithms; 3rd Edition (Addison-Wesley 1997). (Or see the
home page at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/taocp.html.)