.dc files¶

.dc files are pretty much a raw dump of the memory content, for example an infinite looping program that prints 1, 1, 1, ...:

0 DEF 1
1 OUT 0
2 JMP 1

The syntax of a line thus is:

<cell no> <instruction> [<operand>]

Whereas operand is not required for some commands. Comments are introduced with ;, e.g.:

; full line comment
0 DEF 42 ; the universal constant

.dcl files¶

DC has a built-in little assembly language which makes writing programs a little easier. Thus writing .dcl files is the preferred way to write programs for DC. The assembler has the following advantages over .dc files:

• No need to manually enumerate each cell
• Support for labels with the NAME: syntax
• Constant definition with EQUAL (note that this is like a C macro that gets expanded at compile time, not a run time constant because run time constants have to be defined in a memory cell somewhere)

For example the program from above in DC assembly could look like this:

VALUE: DEF 1
LOOP:
OUT VALUE
JMP LOOP