I can’t help but feel that progress is slow on ELIUS, my from-the-ground-up programming language. This is a natural and expected side-effect of only being able to work on it in spare time during the evenings and weekends, but it is still frustrating.

Today I made some progress on adding the first set of “primitive” words to the language. My first target is to be able to create the minimum set of words needed to define new words. That means manipulating the in-memory data for the “dictionary” which holds the definitions, so the first few words are all about memory: B+ and W+ advance a memory address on the stack by one byte or one 32-bit “word”. B@ and W@ read a byte and a word respectively from the memory address on the top of the stack. B! and W! store the value second on the stack to the location given on the top of the stack.

I have some unit tests in place for these words, but want to complete them before moving on to the next bit – words to read and update the system variables such as the “HEAD” of the dictionary.

This may be a small update, but it still feels like progress to me.