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A Language Design Analysis of HolyC - Harrison Totty

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I was recently introduced to the story of Terry A. Davis, a schizophrenic programmer who independently designed the free operating system TempleOS. This article will not delve into the story of Terry or TempleOS, but instead the programming language Terry wrote specifically for developing the operating system - a language he dubbed “HolyC”. HolyC, as the name would imply, is a C-like programming language with a number of key differences and improvements. Like C, it’s whitespace independent and compiles to assembly. However, as Terry describes in the OS’s own documentation for the built-in assembly language: TempleOS uses nonstandard opcodes. Asm is kind-of a bonus and I made changes to make the assembler simpler. For opcodes which can have different numbers of args, I separated them out – Like IMUL and IMUL2. The assembler will not report certain invalid forms. Get an Intel datasheet and learn which forms are valid. This article won’t cover the assembly layer of TempleOS, but the above

I was recently introduced to the story of Terry A. Davis , a schizophrenic programmer who independently designed the free operating system TempleOS . This article will not delve into the story of Terry or TempleOS, but instead the programming language Terry wrote specifically for developing the operating system - a language he dubbed “ HolyC ”. HolyC , as the name would imply, is a C-like programming language with a number of key differences and improvements. Like C , it’s whitespace independent and compiles to assembly. However, as Terry describes in the OS’s own documentation for the built-i

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