self modifying hardware permit me to quote fragments of praetzel sunee uwaterloo ca s article out of context newsgroups sci electronics comp lsi cad from praetzel sunee uwaterloo ca eric praetzel date feb gmt currently the xnf format is propierty and i know of at least on person at a university who was able to get it after signing a non disclosure agreement the xilinx bit map format is pretty well top secret i would love to know it because then you could make self modifying hardware as it is i had to reverse eng the xilinx tools to dump the bit map to the fpga because it only runs on the computer with the hardware key self modifying hardware could be very interesting computers that could write thier own programs assemblers compilers were an immense breakthrough from calculators that couldn t i eagerly await a programmable gate array which uses a pd format and does not cost your first born to program till then we will keep on reverse engineering whatever we can as it is one company that i worked at has gone under fpgas are what they needed to make their product competitive they could not afford them in the end you could say that they could not afford to not use them but the management discovered that too late eric my condolences i can t even imagine what i could do with self modifing hardware i can imagine self modifying software and even though all my teachers say that s bad even worse than goto check out what the experts used to say about self modifying code he uses orders rather than opcodes on the principles of large scale computing machines by goldstine and von neumann collected in john von neumann collected works vol v reprinted here with absolutely no permission from anyone we plan to have a full size binary digit word hold either contain full size number equivalent to decimal digits but we will use the first binary digit to denote the sign or two binary digit orders it should be added that this technique of automatic substitutions into orders i e the machine s ability to modify its own orders under the control of other ones among its orders is absolutely necessary for a flexible code thus if part of the memory is used as a function table then looking up a value of that function for a value of the variable which is obtained in the course of the computation requires that the machine itself should modify or rather make up the reference to the memory in the order which controls this looking up and the machine can only make this modification after it has already calculated the value of the variable in question on the other hand this ability of the machine to modify its own orders is one of the things which makes coding the non trivial operation which we have to view it as david cary tenor e and comp engineering finger caryd a cs okstate edu s e ave tulsa ok usa sol universe v david cary tenor e and comp engineering finger caryd a cs okstate edu s e ave tulsa ok usa sol universe v
