The Mouse Programming Language on CP/M

Summary

Mouse is an interpreted stack orientated language designed by Peter Grogono around 1975. It was designed to be a small but powerful language for microcomputers, similar to Forth, but much simpler. One obvious difference to Forth is that Mouse interprets a stream of characters most of which are only a single character and it relies more on variables rather than rearranging the stack as much. The version for CP/M on the Walnut Creek CD is quite small at only 2k. Peter Grogono says in Byte Magazine Volume 04 Number 07 - July 1979: The justification for Mouse is that it incorporates many features of high level languages, yet it can be implemented without the resources needed by most high level languages. More specifically, Mouse programs demonstrate the use and implementation of arrays, functions, procedures, nested control structures, local variables, recursion and several methods of passing parameters from one procedure to another. Hello, World! Example As a first example to show what Mouse code looks like, here is a program to output "Hello, Word!" ten times to the screen. ~ Output 'Hello, World' ten times 10 c: ( c. ^ "Hello, World!" c. 1 - c: ) $ The first line beginning with ~ is a comment indicated by the ~ character. Next we have 10 c: This pushes 10 onto the stack, then c: pops it off the stack and stores it in the c variable. c is being used as a counter. We now have a loop begun using the ( character and ended using with ). This loop will process its contents indefinitely until it is broken out of using the ^ character. Next we have c. ^, the c. pushes the contents of variable c onto the stack and then ^ pops it off the stack and if it is less than 1 it breaks out of the loop. "Hello, World!" outputs 'Hello, World', using " to output the string. The ! inside the string is converted to a newline character. c. 1 - c: decrements c by first pushing its value to the stack using c. then subtracting 1 from the top of stack using 1 -, then it stores the value on the ...