Virtual Machine

Hello /prague/

I'm working on implementing a virtual machine of my own design. I started by writing the ALU, and I decided that it should operate on 32 bit words. It allows for many of the basic functions (NOT, AND, OR, XOR, >>, <<, +, -, *, /).

I am entirely new to designing machines (I'm a college sophomore.) and I ran into the problem of representation of floating point data. Is this implemented directly into the hardware of computers, or does software manipulate words to create floating point number manipulation higher up?

For a VM I think the best language is C or something that let's you manipulate data on bit level.
That avoids problems like the one >>4 points out.