Dual-stack (Forth) processors

Agreed. There are preferences either way and valid arguments on both camps. However, I think we can agree that excessive quoting is not good.

What's that single keystroke? Maybe there's something I haven't discovered here.

I'm using Outlook Express. On the upper right there's a tree display of the message subjects. Directly below that what they call the "Preview pane" where you see the text for the message highlighted in the thread display. As I click through a thread with the trackball I can read top-posted messages without further actions. Bottom posted messages require clicking within the message pane and either using the scroll wheel to get to the bottom or other navigation (PageDown, Cursor, End, etc.).

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Martin Euredjian
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Martin Euredjian
Loading thread data ...

discovered

the

Reply to
Jon Harris

...

The two bit I/O pins could save a UART. The only time I ever used it, it wasn't my choice.

Jerry

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Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Reply to
Jerry Avins

Jerry, I think a solution to the problem came up a couple of months ago on one of the Mozilla groups during a top vs bottom post flame war. Don't remember just what it was as I wasn't interested at the time.

Reply to
Richard Owlett

Then +p to get P is also two keystrokes. As you like it.

Jerry

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Reply to
Jerry Avins

I'm using Mozilla 1.5 with no problems since its release. Mozilla 1.6 is out now. Isn't Netscape 7.x based on Moz 1.4 or earlier?

Reply to
Richard Owlett

If focus is in the preview pane just "End" will get you to the bottom.

Sorry for the off-topic nature of this. I scan-through and read hundreds of emails and newsgroup posts per day and just a few extra keystrokes can be a pain in the you-know-what.

Using the preview pane:

Keystrokes

----------------------- Top-posted reading:

Click message in treeview (and read, of course) Click next message in treeview Click next message in treeview Repeat as needed.

Bottom-posted reading:

Click message in treeview Click in preview pane Press "End" (and read, of course) Click message in treeview Click in preview pane Press "End" (and read, of course) Repeat as needed

or Click message in treeview Tab to preview pane Press "End" (find the start of the new text and read, of course) Click message in treeview Tab to preview pane Press "End" (find the start of the new text and read, of course) Repeat as needed

There is a way to improve upon this. If you double-click to actually open a message you can use Ctrl+> and Ctrl+< to navigate from post to post with "Home" and "End" getting you to the start and end of a message immediately. The downside here is that you can't skip over messages you might not want to read and thus download them whether you like it or not. Probably not a big deal in light of the efficiency gain.

Still, for me, either nicely snipped bottom-posted messages or top-posted messages are quickest to navigate through. Messages with three pages or prior-traffic quoting are an absolute waste of time and bandwidth. I should note that I'm working with a 1920 x 1200 display, so, for most messages, regardless of posting style, I can read them without scrolling whatsoever.

Enough of this, back to Forth/FPGA's.

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Martin Euredjian
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Martin Euredjian

I've thought about this in terms of internal use. As much as I like FORTH (used it extensively in the 80's and early 90's) the reality seems to be that C is the way to go.

It's a matter of the business equation more than a technical rationalization. FORTH is very cryptic for non-FORTH programmers and finding skilled FORTH programmers is not as easy as C programmers. And, while productivity with FORTH can be substantially greater than with C or Assembly, you are, eventually, forced to contend with code maintenance, reuse and changes in design teams (Oh, no! Our only FORTH guy left!).

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Martin Euredjian
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Martin Euredjian

It was only segmented if you wanted to go *beyond* 64 kB. If you are happy with a small memory space, the x86 family works very much like an

8085, even down to the 8 bit registers. Funny how Intel did that :)
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Rick "rickman" Collins

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rickman

I don't know diddly about Outlook, but in most windows programs you can go to the bottom of any display by using +. I belive Jerry said that in one of his posts.

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Rick "rickman" Collins

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rickman

You had to go and say that, didn't you! This is being posted to the Forth newsgroup and you will hear a few comments about this... ;)

All that I will say is that I was quite happy coding in Pascal for a long time. I switched to C when Pascal compilers were not already available at a new job. And I must say that it was a lot harder to write a working program for a newbie.

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Rick "rickman" Collins

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rickman

Hi I have written a target compiler for Forth to run on the ADSP218x parts( analog devices ). It is not intented to be used to write the lowest level of DSP functions, like FFT, IIR or FIR but is intended to work in parallel with this code written in assembly. As a forth, I benched it compared to a Novix NC4000. With a 2181 running at 33Mhz, it executed Forth code at about the rate of a 10Mhz NC4000. That isn't to bad at all. The code is available on the FIG site someplace. Dr Ting has also written a full eForth for the same processor. It is on the CDROM that he sells through Offette Press. I don't know how it compares to mine. But it does come with an interpreter and mine is just a target compiler so you'd need to write your own interpreter and create your own dictionary structure ( you might look at Chuck Moore's CMForth for a good example of a simple dictionary/interpreter ). Later Dwight

Reply to
dwight elvey

Rick,

True, but it works > MaI don't know diddly about Outlook, but in most windows programs you can

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Ray Andraka

or

I realize that. No flames please. I have two decades of Forth experience. I'm from the days when you built your own computer from chips, wrote a monitor, got Forth in there, wrote your own editor and then developed your apps. I enjoy and love Forth. I truly do. I also love a language called APL. I think it should rule the World.

Hoewever, when all the smoke and bullshit clears out, you have to run a business, hire people, survive design team changes, hire consultants, maintain code, etc. and the "business equation" I refer to can take precedence. C is pretty hard to avoid. I have a current project that I did in Assembler out of being a snob and not a day goes by that I don't wish I had done it in C. We'll have to re-write it eventually, I already know that.

I also draw from the experience of a good friend who started a biotech company about fifteen years ago with a product done entirely in Forth. It worked great. He developed it on his own. Made tons of money. And then, he got stuck with it. He couldn't find decent Forth programmers to remove himself from that position. Anyone can write programs in Forth. Not everyone can write efficient, well engineered programs tough. And, not everyone can walk-up to hundreds of screens of source code and figure it out without lots of coaching. He eventually hired me to convert the whole thing to C. After that he could hire just about anyone to support and expand the product.

The only reason I could see to do a Forth machine in an FPGA is that you might have valuable Forth code that needs to run 100x faster than the microprocessor curretly hosting it. So, you do a 6502 (or whatever) on steroids or a true Forth machine in a fast FPGA and solve your problem.

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Martin Euredjian
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Martin Euredjian

...

...

What a lot of interesting points! The first paragraph is IMHO about the cost of converting (competent) programmers to Forth. MPE almost never hires Forth programmers as permanent staff. In general, learning the business takes much longer than learning a new programming language.

The second paragraph illustrates that learning two new things at the same time is vastly more difficult than learning one. Screens so often trigger "corporate immune syndrome" that we gave them up long ago regardless of their technical merit. The quality of the code is a management issue, not a technical issue.

The third paragraph illustrates what I consider to be a fallacy these days. Forgive me if I have drawn a wrong inference. With modern optimising Forth compilers such as MPE's VFX, code quality for performance is as good as the ouput of compilers for any other language. The limiting factor is then to find hardware (with the right price/performance ratio) to run the application.

Stephen

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Stephen Pelc

I can. I've recently been involved in getting two Forths working on

6809 boards (for fun and education). Where the 6502 is the nicest true 8 bit processor, the 6809 is the nicest 8/16 hybrid processor. Its reputation is well deserved, it really is a brilliant design and a joy to program for. (If you ever manage find the description of the 8086 by its designer Morse. It is actually not such a bad design.)

Last saturday I gave a talk for the Dutch fig chapter about assembly programming in Forth. I shaved off 16 states from the 44 states inner cycle of UM/MOD (Camelforth version). I would be interested if an optimising compiler could get UM/MOD down to that ...

We (=Dutch Fig chapter) got those boards for free. (Still plenty left to dole out.) See also http:/home.hccnet.nl/p.c.wiegmans/6809werkgroup In principle this is a Dutch page, however all programs and most downloads are in English.

Coming up next are those 68020 VME crates. Studying the addressing modes (18 in total!) gives the same feeling as the 80386. It is going overboard with indirect base register with scaled offset register plus internal and outside offset and such (I don't claim to get that one right but you get the drift.)

Built in serial port. I like the Z80 but its serial companion chip was a great pain.

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Albert van der Horst

Bottom posting is bad. It lures Windows Lusers into not snipping anything. If a post doesn't fit on a screen (this one does) you are supposed to warn [LONG] in the subject line. What is a pain to you is not bottom posting but the people that are in the habit of not snipping.

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Albert van der Horst,Oranjestr 8,3511 RA UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
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Albert van der Horst

This would also work with any ram arhicture, no?

But there are other things you can do - you can convert the lack of ports into a scheduling restriction where you get a pipeline bubble if one of the source operands is not being forwarded from a previous instruction.

The other option is doubling clock cycle and having two pipelines that can pair instructions whenever there are enough ports (including forwards) - things like the right code mix and immediate argumnets (plus some help from scheduling) can make for a very nice result.

There are others.

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	Sander

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Reply to
Sander Vesik

Rockwell's R65F11 was a nice 6502 + Forth chip. I still have a dozen or so wire-wrapped R65F11 boards in the garage somewhere. I built them back around '85 for a light-industrial robot arm I designed as well. One processor per axis. Hardware (as in wire-wrapped 'HC parts) PWM. An additional processor for supervision and yet another to communicate with a PC/programming console. That was a fun project.

Today you could probably stuff all of into a single FPGA.

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Martin Euredjian
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Martin Euredjian

Is any chance, or possibility to have HDL or VHDL for F21 or I21 or P21. that would make real portablebility of those processors Silicon Foundrywise. This because If you have over 100k volume product design with F21 to design on single source, F21 may be idal low cost wise, but depent on one foundry, seems lilltle bit risky on now a day way of life. But if FPGA chosed for foundry portability at cost more than F21 style pruduct. as long you have vertical room on a board you may make it by piggybag for different FPGA family for 2nd source, if plan a head at borad design time.

Since F21 or I21 samall counts in gates wise, HDL or VHDL may be not huges codewise as other processor compare to 8051, ( was there a HDL or VHDL for 8051 mention on this FPGA or on the sister newsgroup CAD newsgroup ? ) Hope this give you some incentive to have HDL or VHDL for I21 or F21. Is any Angles may help you out on that in U.S. Sicon Valley, or you have to go off shore for the angles ?

Also is there a chance of HDL or VHDL in Forth, Since HDL or VHDL so wordy and long, so Forth may reduce those WORDY world to less volumewise for easy debug on those big processors, This is a big SW project..

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Hugo2H

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