NAME

       mixal - a load-and-go MIX assembler

SYNOPSIS

       mixal [ file ...  ]

DESCRIPTION

       Mixal  is an implementation of the hypothetical MIX computer and its assembly language called MIXAL.  The
       computer was designed by Donald Knuth for use in his monumental and yet to be finished  book  series  The
       Art  of  Computer Programming.  All programs and all programming exercises in the book are written in the
       MIXAL language.

       This implementation is a load-and-go assembler, meaning that you provide it with a MIXAL program  source,
       which it translates into MIX machine code, which it promptly executes by acting as a MIX emulator.

       You  give  Mixal zero or more program source files in the command line, which the program interprets.  If
       you give it no arguments, it expects to find a program in the standard input stream.  After  the  program
       has executed, the final state of the machine registers are printed to the standard output stream.

       The  card  punch  and  line  printer  devices  are  connected  to  the  standard input and output stream,
       respectively.  Console input and output are connected to standard input and output, and the disk  devices
       are  connected  to files named diskN in the current directory, where N is the device number.  Those files
       are created on demand.

BUGS

       This MIXAL implementation does not do floating-point.  The tape devices are not implemented.

AUTHOR

       This MIXAL implementation was designed and written by Darius Bacon, and then ported  to  Unixish  systems
       and  debugged  by  Eric  S. Raymond.  This version includes corrections to multiplication and division by
       Larry Gately.  This manual page was written for Debian by Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, with changes by  Darius
       Bacon.

SEE ALSO

       The  files  /usr/share/doc/mixal/READ.ME and /usr/share/doc/mixal/NOTES.gz contain some information about
       this MIXAL implementation.  Be sure to read /usr/share/doc/mixal/README.Debian, too.

       A description of the MIX system and the MIXAL language can be found in Donald E. Knuth's book The Art  of
       Computer  Programming,  Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms; 3rd Edition (Addison-Wesley 1997).  (Or see the
       home page at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/taocp.html.)

Debian project                                     18 May 2003                                          MIXAL(1)