The Imp language was never ported to the Intel architecture during the heyday of Imp - the X86 was seen as a very poor architecture and not worthy of any intellectual effort. Back in the days of the 286 that was probably true, and by the time the 3/4/586 architectures were the dominant force in the industry, Imp had already been abandoned by Edinburgh as a systems development or teaching language. So when this project was created and we started to get our hands on some Imp source code, Andy Davis offered to write a back-end for the Imp77 version of the language.
This he did indeed do and had a usable compiler running in about 6 weeks. An amazing piece of work which you can read all about at his site. You can download this compiler yourself and run it on Windows or Linux! Andy's compiler was bootstrapped using the pre-built parser (pass 1) from Mouses and was bootstrapped by a Skimp compiler which he wrote in C.
-- GrahamToal - 19 Jan 2004
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