Diana Compiled Language Reference Manual

A simple compiled language written for the Diana-II 6-bit computer. This language was written to aid development by providing all basic instructions not natively supported by the architecture.

The following documentation is intended for programmers who are already familiar with other assembly like languages.

Acknowledgments: The following documentation is strongly inspired by the Solaris x86 assembly language reference manual

Installation and Help

From crates.io: (Recommended)

cargo install dianac

From source:

git clone https://github.com/5-pebbles/dianac.git
cd dianac
cargo install --path .

Basic help:

~ ❯ dianac --help
An emulator, compiler, and interpreter for the Diana Compiled Language

Usage: dianac <COMMAND>

Commands:
  repl     Start the interactive emulation REPL
  compile  Compile a static binary (6-bit bytes are padded with zeros)
  help     Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Options:
  -h, --help     Print help
  -V, --version  Print version

If there is anything that can be improved, please let me know:

• Issue: GitHub.
• Email: 5-pebble@protonmail.com.

Diana II Specifications

The Diana II is 6-bit minimal instruction set computer designed around using NOR as a universal logic gate.

• byte size: 6-bits.

• endianness: little-endian.

• address size: 12-bits (two 6-bit operands, first is higher order).

• unique instructions: 6.

Instructions

Layout:

Each instruction is 6 bits in the format [XX][YY][ZZ]:

• X: 2-bit instruction identifier.
• Y: 2-bit first operand identifier.
• Z: 2-bit second operand identifier.

The first operand of NOR can't be immediate, so that allows another four instructions:

[!Note] Instructions and operands are uppercase because my 6-bit character encoding does not support lowercase...

Operands

Memory Layout

There are a total of 4096 unique address each containing 6 bits.

Lexical Conventions

Statements

A program consists of one or more files containing statements. A statement consists of tokens separated by whitespace and terminated by a newline character.

Comments

A comment can reside on its own line or be appended to a statement. The comment consists of an octothorp (#) followed by the text of the comment and a terminating newline character.

Labels

A label can be placed before the beginning of a statement. During compilation the label is assigned the address of the following statement and can be used as a keyword operand. A label consists of the LAB keyword followed by an identifier labels are global in scope and appear in the files symbol table.

Tokens

There are 6 classes of tokens:

• Identifiers
• Keywords
• Registers
• Numerical constants
• Character constants
• Operators

Identifiers

An identifier is an arbitrarily-long sequence of letters, underscores, and digits. The first character must be letter or underscore. Uppercase and lowercase characters are equivalent.

Keywords

Keywords such as instruction mnemonics and directives are reserved and cannot be used as identifiers. For a list of keywords see the Keyword Tables.

Registers

The Diana-II architecture provides three registers [A, B, C] these are reserved and can not be used as identifiers. Uppercase and lowercase characters are equivalent.

Numerical Constants

Numbers in the Diana-II architecture are unsigned 6-bit integers. These can be expressed in several bases:

• Decimal. Decimal integers consist of one or more decimal digits (0–9).
• Binary. Binary integers begin with “0b” or “0B” followed by zero or more binary digits (0, 1).
• Hexadecimal. Hexadecimal integers begin with “0x” or “0X” followed by one or more hexadecimal digits (0–9, A–F). Hexadecimal digits can be either uppercase or lowercase.

Character Constants

A character constant consists of a supported character enclosed in single quotes ('). A character will be converted to its numeric representation based on the table of supported characters bellow:

If a lowercase character is used, it will be converted to its uppercase representation.

Operators

The compiler supports the following operators for use in expressions. Operators have no assigned precedence. Expressions can be grouped in parentheses () to establish precedence.

All operators except Logical NOT require two values and parentheses ():

• (5 + 9 + 3) = 17
• !0b111110 = 0b000001
• (2 + (2 * 5)) = 12
• (2 + 2 * 5) = 20

Keywords, Operands, and Addressing

Keywords represent an instruction, set of instructions, or a directive. Operands are entities operated upon by the keyword. Addresses are the locations in memory of specified data.

Operands

A keyword can have zero to three operands separated by whitespace characters. For instructions with a source and destination this language uses Intel's notation destination(lefthand) then source(righthand).

There are 4 types of operands:

• Immediate. A 6-bit constant expression that evaluate to an inline value.
• Register. One of the three 6-bit general-purpose registers provided by the Diana-II architecture.
• Either. An immediate or a register operand.
• Address. A single 12-bit identifier or two a pair of whitespace separated 6-bit either operands.
• Conditional. A pair of square brackets [ ] containing a pair of 6-bit operands separated by whitespace and one of the following comparison operators:

  ==	Equal
  !=	Not equal
  >	Greater
  >=	Greater or equal
  <	Less
  <=	Less or equal

Addressing

The Diana-II architecture uses 12-bit addressing. Labels can be split into two 6-bit immediate values by appending a colon followed by a 1 or 0. If a keyword requires an address it can be provided as two 6-bit values or a single 12-bit identifier:

• LOD MAIN = LOD MAIN:0 MAIN:1.

Side Effects

Any side effects will be listed in the notes of a keyword read each carefully. If a keyword clobbers an unrelated register, it will select the first available in reverse alphabetical order, e.g.

• XNOR C 0x27 will clobber B
• XNOR A 0x27 will clobber C

Keyword Tables

Operands will be displayed in square brackets [ ] using the following shorthand:

• [reg] = register
• [imm] = immediate
• [eth] = either
• [add] = address
• [con] = conditional

Bitwise Logic Keywords

Shift and Rotate Keywords

These keywords simply load the corresponding address from the right and left rotate lookup tables.

Arithmetic Keywords

Memory Keywords

Jump Keywords

Miscellaneous Keywords