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And if you didn't have C or another human language, how would you tell a system to generate text on a screen after working out the specifics of the language you want to create without the help of another?

If someone wanted to write a compiler for a system for which no languages other than assembly exist, how would they go about mapping an instruction to a set of characters? Also, when writing a bootloader and an OS, how does someone program a text editor or an API, and how does someone make the editor understand how to interpret a command?

How are characters such as {} and ; interpreted and where do you store the info for how they should be understood by the system and a language that you just created?

I know how compiler design generally works and how the machine transfers data to registers and writes them to memory and that it's all just ones and zeros on a clever construction of multiple circuits, but I can only imagine calculations up until that point. Breadboards make the most sense to me, because when I build them, I can clearly see how data is transferred.

But back when there was no BASIC or Fortran or C, how did people start creating measures to show text on a screen that can be understood by the system?

Thanks for any answers:)

oldtimerjoe
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  • Note that "displaying text" and "interpreting text" are two very different tasks and you can easily do each one on a system that's incapable of doing the other. "Interpreting" is basically *entirely* up to your programs like compilers & the such, the rest of the computer pretty much doesn't need to know what characters any given bytes are. And for displaying a simple (and commonly used) system is to just have a memory area that maps each byte value to some glyph (stored as a bitmap) that's then rendered to the screen (modern text rendering is way more complex, though). – Joachim Sauer Mar 02 '23 at 13:30

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