(snip)
There is no special reason why I went with base-3, I simply
found the subject of an alternate base computer interesting
and base-3 was the first thing that came up in my mind.
Symmetric trinary is interesting, in that you avoid the complications
of signed arithmetic. Consider base-3 where the digit values
are {-1, 0, +1}. You can then represent positive or negative
numbers using such digits without the complications of sign
magnitude, digit complement, or radix complement.
The symmetric form works with any odd base, where 3 is the
most convenient, but one could use 5, or 11, or 13.
At the end I only look at this project only as an exercise
to increasing my (and others) knowledge of CPUs and the
low-level stuff without touching a transistor.
Fortran allows for any integer base greater than one.
C pretty much requires binary. (In case you had thought
about HLL compilers for your machine.)
Knuth's MIX processor was designed to allow for either decimal
or binary. I don't remember now if it could be done in trinary.
If it does, that might be a good place to start.
I know even less about MMIX.
-- glen