Computation structures

Some students find weird that a process that is assigned a value di works on the (di +1)th line. This is just a linguistic trick. Indeed, the process that is assigned the value 0 works on the 1st line, not the « 0th » line

You are allowed to develop on whatever system you prefer, but be sure that your program is tested and fully functional on the students machines (ms8**). In that perspective, I strongly recommand that you develop on these machines as well. FYI, they have ssh and sftp enabled for remote access.

Is it normal that my program works on the simulator but fails on the submission platform ?

It might not be caused by a bug in your code: I found a bug in the tests. I am currently working on fixing the issue and I will update this page as soon as it is done. In any case, the submission deadline will be postponed to tomorrow evening so that you can benefit the corrected tests.
Update The issue has been fixed, you can now resubmit your file(s) to check if you pass the tests.

βSim is a simulator for the β-assembly language written in Java. It features:

• An assembler to generate machine code.
• A debugger featuring instruction per instruction execution, registers, stack and memory visualization.
• A minimal code editor with error highlighting (when the code is assembled).

The simulator comes as a .jar package you can run in several ways:

• On modern systems with UI (Windows,...), you can simply double-click on the file.
• If you prefer using a console, you can run: java -jar bsim-vram.jar [file1 file2 ...].

Because the built-in code editor is minimal, I don't recommend using it for developing programs. For instance, there is no "Undo" nor "Redo" option, so you might lose some work by performing some non-deliberate deletions. It is better to first write your code in another text editor such as NotePad++ or Sublime Text (β-assembly syntax highlighting and snippets, check this forum for installation location), and then load it into the simulator for testing.

Loading and launching code

To execute some code you have written in the simulator, you first have to load this piece of code in the editor. This can be done by clicking on in the upper toolbar and walking through your filesystem for getting the .asm file.

When your code is ready to be executed, the execution can be triggered by clicking on in the upper toolbar. If your code does not contain any syntax error, you will be redirected to the execution window. Otherwise, the syntax error will be described in the bottom of the editor window.

Breakpoints

You can indicate to the β-machine you want to pause the execution of your code at a specific instruction by writing the keyword .breakpoint:

main:
    |; Do something
    LD(R1, 0, R5)
    .breakpoint         |; The machine will pause its execution at this step
    ADDC(R5, R2, R6)
    |; ...