Cross Platform Development

I think you mean

: OFF_TOPIC !DISCUSSIONS FORTH FOR (XPOST SEE) THERE OVER NEWSGROUP WHOLE A THERE'S ;

;-)

They might have had the ability to save state in a loadable form. I can only quote (which is what I was doing from what I remember reading at the time (late 70s/early 80s).

Noted.

There were a number of odd/specialised languages around at the time which are not much used now and many of them had similar development characteristics and the ability to run on small, slow machines.

MUMPS, anybody?

FWIW what attracted me to Forth in the first place is its RPN notiaion: I'm a huge fan of HP calculators and have an operating HP-21 on my desk at the moment - I bought it new in 1976. New batteries, of course, but the rest is original.

Lol! I dated a gal who knew MUMPS and loved it. She works for a medical testing lab and they use it in a lot of their internal systems.

Yeah, I liked them too. I even managed to find an inexpensive alternate RPN calculator once, but it didn't hold up like HPs did. So now my only calculator is Excalibur for the PC which is RPN with some nice features. It's not open source so I can't make any improvements myself. But if you have forth, you can pretty easily roll your own. I also use Win32Forth and there is a UI package for it which I have not explored yet.

All the Forths I ever worked on had a binary kernel, written in Forth and Forth assembler, that was cross-compiled by another Forth for the new target. Until the 80's, Chuck insisted in it being only 2K, and the rest of the system was compiled from source by that kernel. It was fast enough (a few seconds) that it wasn't worth compiling more.

In the 80's, with polyFORTH, we went to an 8K kernel and compiled everything else. Nowadays the precompiled kernel a good deal larger, but still a lot of the system is compiled at boot time. If the time it takes is not perceptable (under 1 sec.) the flexibility you gain by having a lot in source is a good thing.

Well said.

MUMPS was unbelievably slow, even on fairly fast machines. Interactivity was its own advantage.

:-)

Cheers, Elizabeth

The key advantage of Forth is is code density.

I ported a version of Forth to a board I was staled with taking from hardware to basic OS, and it was indeed ALL assembler.

And yet what it would have compiled to, or been stored at if it were 'Forth' would have been almost exactly the same.

I thought Minicom was for serial cable. But Ok, it might do ethernet too.

Personally I use putty. just download from

The putty exefile is all you need.

double-click and type in the ip-address.

I use it daily - for compiling the code I changed with Notepad++

I'm not sure we are communicating well. My set up is...

Launchpad | | USB | Raspberry Pi | | Ethernet | PC

I am running Extra Putty to SSH connect to a terminal window on the Pi which is running Minicom or Microcom to talk to the launchpad over the USB serial port. Minicom does not add the CRs to the LFs while Microcom does. Putty doesn't seem to be able to add the CRs.

we were not ...

Ok - I get it. No. You don't need putty for that. I was under the impression that you used minicom to talk to the pi - from a pc.

does not quite make sense from windows ...

But now I get it.

Re-reading your posts again, I think you have a working solution ?

Yes, I think I have everything I need from the rPi. Thanks for the help.

Elizabeth D. Rather wrote: ...

MUMPS is a lot like Forth in one aspect: Both were able to create multi-user systems out of low-powered CPU's (Z80 for Forth (?) and 80286 for MUMPS). And when 386's and 486's appeared on the scene, these physically small machines took over the duties formerly relegated to much larger mini-computers. As has been said of Forth in another thread, MUMPS was able to eek out a lot more performance from the same system than other languages could.

Steve

MUMPS is still the primary language used at the Veterans Administration healthcare systems, which I believe is the largest such system in the world.

Your version of history is interesting, but appears to be unique.

MUMPS was a minicomputer language developed in the 60s. Specifically for medical use.

Looking at the wiki entry reveals its more akin to a super COBOL than anything else.

You got all that from the wikipedia page? You seem to read selectively. It was developed in a medical environment but the applications are much more varied because the language is not specific to the medical community in any way. Did you read that Ameritrade uses it to handle 12 billion transactions per day? Seems to do well for a language from the

Is "super COBOL" a good thing or a bad thing?

Of course he did. The first l MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System)...

I wouldn't say so: its far too terse to ever be that. I mean, you can write 'Hello World' in a single line in it, but in COBOL it would be something like this at its shortest:

ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. PROGRAM-ID. hello_world. PROCEDURE DIVISION. PARA-1. DISPLAY "Hello, World". STOP RUN.

... untested: I don't have a COBOL compiler to hand and its been a while, but I'd be surprised if even a modern compiler would accept a program without both environment and procedure divisions being declared, at least one paragraph in the procedure division and either a STOP RUN or (possibly) an EXIT PROGRAM statement.

To me MUMPS looks more like a 4GL (4th generation language) such as Dbase, Clipper, Sculptor or Cognos PowerHouse because all these combined a programming language with an integral database (often a set of ISAM files) than COBOL.

COBOL latter supported ISAM and random files but, then so did many other languages. Admittedly, IDMS (a network database) looked as if it was part of COBOL, but that was merely an illusion caused by the excellent IDBMS preprocessor. You wrote code containing IDMS verbs that *looked* like part of COBOL, but the preprocessor replaced them with subroutine calls before passing the result to the compiler.

Apologies for going on a length about this but I spent around 15 years writing many thousands of lines of COBOL, something that's remarkably hard to forget, try as one might.

The name is pretty clear to me... "Multi-Programming System". It doesn't say anything about medical use, just that it was developed for a hospital. They do more than medicine you know. Inventory, finance and logistics are applicable to many, many things.

Argh! CALL =E2=80=9CCBLTDLI=E2=80=9D USING GU, Stores-Database-PCB, Stores-S= egment-Area, =

Stores-Root-SSA so 70's!

forth NG dropped, as it's not at all similar.

-- =

Bah, and indeed, Humbug

I think that came later - the article says that it was developed by a group that worked in an animal testing lab to keep track of results and then was than spotted by patient admissions and used in that area.

After that it seems to have a home in finance and banking as well as in other medical situations.

Cm'on, who outside the medical world would would think that MUMPS was a great acronym? I think folks have largely forgotten the disease now, along with measles, but when I was a kid mumps, measles and chicken pox were the things you didn't want to get, and mumps may have been the nastiest of these, especially if you were bloke and past puberty. ...goes off fuming about the selfish bastards who refuse to vaccinate their kids...

Lol. Yeah, to paraphrase Lincoln, most of the people are goofy about some things and some of the people are goofy about most things... More recently I have started looking at everything in life with a critical eye and I am finding no end to the things that people accept without questioning. I believe this is mostly because people are lazy... but, there is a point to where paying attention to all the details just becomes exhausting, especially if you try to live in the same world you have always lived in. So most people just follow the herd. Is that what they refer to as "herd immunity"... immunity from thought?

BTW, I am surprised they were even allowed to call it MUMPS. I think that would be a real issue in the medical community. It's like calling a new cell phone targeted to doctors... EBOLA. "Honey, I can't find my EBOLA anywhere. Would you give it a ring? Oh, there's my EBOLA."

Why not drop the rpi group too? This is not much related to that either...