A Propsed Method for Simpliofied Microcomputer Programming*

A key obstacle to wider application of the new microprocessors is the need to program in assembly language with fairly cumbersome instruction sets. We propose a new technique which will make it easy for applications-oriented non-programmers to generate efficient microcomputer programs without any need to learn assembly language. The user merely specifies an analog-computer-like block diagram whose intuitively meaningful block-operators specify standard mathematical operations (addition, multiplication, integration, etc.) and input/output operations (e.g., analog/digital conversion, switching, sensing). These standard operations are implemented as subroutines in the microcomputer read-only memory (ROM). An interactive editor/translator program running on a small minicomputer translates block-diagram specifications into a simple address table and loads it into the microcomputer memory (RAM, PROM, or ROM). This address table represents the block-diagram operation sequence and specifies successive jumps to the correct standard subroutines in ROM and data fetching/storing operations in the random-access memory.