Dual-stack (Forth) processors

[Martin Euredjian]

rickman wrote:

Personally, I don't care one way or another how people post, I'm not
interested in getting into the top/bottom posting wars.

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

Besides, it is only a single key stroke to go to the bottom of a page.
Is that really a big problem?

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.).


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
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[Jon Harris]

Ctrl-End. I guess it's 2 key strokes, and you still have to click within
the message, though Tab will also move the focus from the tree view to the
preview pane.
(top-posted for your convenience!)

"Martin Euredjian" <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:vpcZb.27819$OB1.14027@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com...

rickman wrote:

Besides, it is only a single key stroke to go to the bottom of a page.
Is that really a big problem?

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.).

 

[Jerry Avins]

Andrew Reilly wrote:

...

Idle curiosity: why pick the 8085 over the Z80, in that time frame?

Cheers,

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

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
ŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻ

 

[Richard Owlett]

Jerry Avins wrote:

Martin Euredjian wrote:

Jabari,

What's annoying about bottom posting?

[snip]


When I reply to a top-posted message with a sig -- like yours --
everything below the sig is gone, as here. The _)(*&^%$#@!! news program
snips it all silently.

Jerry

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.

 

[Jerry Avins]

Jon Harris wrote:

Ctrl-End. I guess it's 2 key strokes, ...

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

Jerry
--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
ŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻŻ

 

[Richard Owlett]

Jerry Avins wrote:

Jon Harris wrote:

"Jerry Avins" <jya@ieee.org> wrote in message
news:4035159f$0$3078$61fed72c@news.rcn.com...

When I reply to a top-posted message with a sig -- like yours --
everything below the sig is gone, as here. The _)(*&^%$#@!! news program
snips it all silently.

Jerry



What newsreader? Sounds like a bug, or at least something that should
have
a switch to defeat it.


If there's a switch, I'd like to know it. Netscape 7.1 It has other bugs
too.

Jerry

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?

 

[Martin Euredjian]

Jon Harris wrote:

Ctrl-End. I guess it's 2 key strokes, and you still have to click within
the message, though Tab will also move the focus from the tree view to the
preview pane.

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.


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
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[Martin Euredjian]

Davka wrote:

Is there a community that is actively involved in discussing and/or
developing FPGA-based Forth chips, or more generally, stack
machines?

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!).


--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
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where
"0_0_0_0_" = "martineu"

 

[rickman]

Randy Yates wrote:

rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> writes:

Jerry Avins wrote:

Jeff Fox wrote:

...

I never used the 80186 but I have heard from people who did use
it in embedded work and later the 386e for embedded was clearly
aimed for and used for some embedded work. (though not be me.)
Technically comparing RTX to 8085 or Z80 seemed compelling but
didn't seem to account for much. (Rocket scientists excepted.)

...

The 80186 was indeed designed for embedded work, including some on-chip
peripherals. I forget what about it made it awkward to use compares to
Z-80 and 6809, but I remember feeling that way. Probably my lack of
familiarity bordering on ignorance.

I don't think it was awkward compared to any of the 8 bitters.

Are you guys kidding? It was that frickin' "segmented architecture" that
was a pain in the ?##. I believe both the Z80 and 6809 were flat memory
spaces, weren't they? Give me an 8085 any day of the 80's.

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

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[rickman]

Martin Euredjian wrote:

rickman wrote:

Personally, I don't care one way or another how people post, I'm not
interested in getting into the top/bottom posting wars.

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

Besides, it is only a single key stroke to go to the bottom of a page.
Is that really a big problem?

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.).

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

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[rickman]

Martin Euredjian wrote:

Davka wrote:

Is there a community that is actively involved in discussing and/or
developing FPGA-based Forth chips, or more generally, stack
machines?

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!).

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.

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

 

[dwight elvey]

"Davka" <mygarbagepail@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<T%XXb.70$pM3.121810@news.uswest.net>...

I want to bring my knowledge about Forth processors up to date, so I'm
posting some questions.

Who is currently selling Forth processors?

What happened to forthchip.com?

Is there a community that is actively involved in discussing and/or
developing FPGA-based Forth chips, or more generally, stack
machines?

Has anyone done any substantial DSP work in Forth? Are there libraries
of code available?

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

How about hardware Forth implementations that include dedicated DSP
hardware?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Ray Andraka]

Rick,

True, but it works in the window you have in focus. A previous poster summarized
why I prefer top posting as well. I can get through tons of posts jsut clicking
in the tree view if they are top posted (no key strokes, so I can do it while
drinking my coffee). Bottom posted ones require a click in the preview followed
by a keystroke or scroll to get to the bottom.. a two handed operation that is
slower. Thanks, I'll stick to my top posting

rickman wrote:

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

--

Rick "rickman" Collins

rick.collins@XYarius.com
Ignore the reply address. To email me use the above address with the XY
removed.

Arius - A Signal Processing Solutions Company
Specializing in DSP and FPGA design URL http://www.arius.com
4 King Ave 301-682-7772 Voice
Frederick, MD 21701-3110 301-682-7666 FAX

--
--Ray Andraka, P.E.
President, the Andraka Consulting Group, Inc.
401/884-7930 Fax 401/884-7950
email ray@andraka.com
http://www.andraka.com

"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, 1759

 

[Martin Euredjian]

rickman wrote:

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!).

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...

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.

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Martin Euredjian

To send private email:
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[Stephen Pelc]

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 09:32:49 GMT, "Martin Euredjian"
<0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote:

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.
....
And, not
everyone can walk-up to hundreds of screens of source code and figure it out
without lots of coaching.
....
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.

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
--
Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@INVALID.mpeltd.demon.co.uk
MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691
web: http://www.mpeltd.demon.co.uk - free VFX Forth downloads

 

[Albert van der Horst]

In article <pan.2004.02.20.00.04.34.373349@gurney.reilly.home>,
Andrew Reilly <andrew@gurney.reilly.home> wrote:
<SNIP>

Well if you were happy with 64k, then the segmentation wasn't a problem:
you could be in "tiny" mode all the time (which is how the CP/M converters
worked, I believe.) The x86 had some more instructions and better
addressing modes than either the 8085 or Z80. Probably not necessarily
nicer than the 6809 though (but I only read about the latter: never got to
actually play with one.)

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.)

Idle curiosity: why pick the 8085 over the Z80, in that time frame?

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

Cheers,

--
Andrew

--
--
Albert van der Horst,Oranjestr 8,3511 RA UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
One man-hour to invent,
One man-week to implement,
One lawyer-year to patent.

 

[Albert van der Horst]

In article <nvdZb.27841$A72.20220@newssvr25.news.prodigy.com>,
Martin Euredjian <0_0_0_0_@pacbell.net> wrote:

Jon Harris wrote:

Ctrl-End. I guess it's 2 key strokes, and you still have to click within
the message, though Tab will also move the focus from the tree view to the
preview pane.

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.

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.

<SNIP>
--
Albert van der Horst,Oranjestr 8,3511 RA UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
One man-hour to invent,
One man-week to implement,
One lawyer-year to patent.

 

[Sander Vesik]

In comp.arch rickman <spamgoeshere4@yahoo.com> wrote:

The older Xilinx parts have small LUT based rams that have true 3 port
memory. But how they implemented it shows that you can always make a 3
port memory from a pair of two port memories. They tied the two write
ports together so that the two RAMs always were written with the same

This would also work with any ram arhicture, no?

data. But the read ports were kept separate allowing any two words to
be read at the same time.

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.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

 

[Martin Euredjian]

Albert van der Horst wrote:

Where the 6502 is the nicest
true 8 bit processor,

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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[Hugo2H]

ology.com (Jeff Fox)
Date: 2/18/04 11:45 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id: <4fbeeb5a.0402182345.3a2f3fa0@posting.google.com

I spent a lot more years
working with P21, I21 and F21 and have a much better memory of
the bit level details there, it was also more recent.

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..