Re: [stack] Re: Joy noob checking in!

Duke Normandin <[email protected]> wrote:
> William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
>> >> By the way, if you HAD been interested in bare metal, I'd have
>> >> suggested learning colorForth and reimplementing it from scratch. Heh.
>> > Why re-implement from scratch?
>> Because it's the only way to really understand the bare metal -- and
>> the only way to get a language ideal for manipulating YOUR machine.

> I see! Re-implementing it in C? or Assembly Language?

In itself. And machine language -- see the source for Rainbow Forth
for an example (the white text that looks like assembly language is
actually a comment). Personally, I'd prefer to first implement an
assembler -- it makes it a bit harder to bootstrap on a new machine,
but if one tests carefully that problem can be avoided. But using raw
machine code for the bootstrap code does make the source code shorter,
as long as the reader allows himself to trust the bootstrap code
(which few humans can read).

>> > and why colorForth?
>> Because it's the simplest dialect of Forth, based on years of Chuck
>> Moore's experience and centered around the idea of bare metal. (It has
>> to be said, though, that Chuck's idea of working with bare metal
>> involved writing Color Forth for the Pentium, writing a chip designer
>> program on it, designing a whole new chip, rewriting for that chip,
>> and designing the successor to that chip on the newly fabbed chip
>> itself. I'm not up to that, and I doubt anyone aside from Chuck is.)

> Simple is Good! Simplest is even better! ;) I wonder why there's no
> mention of it on c.l.f.? I know that Fox and Passinitti (sp?) don't
> hit it off.

It's been talked about a lot, but it's a rather limited audience. Yes,
both of those have their problems; Fox likes being counterculture,
while Passinitti likes to defend common sense. I think both are right,
but neither is always reasonable about that. The Machine Forth list is
more on-topic, and won't get any "annoying" crosstalk from classical
Forthers. (Is there a color forth mailing list? I don't remember.
Machine Forth was Chuck's name for the version of Forth he made before
Color Forth.)

-Wm