Why colorforth?

In Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 05:22:49PM -0400, Mark Slicker wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, Albert van der Horst wrote:
>
> Tim can probably help you out with hardware. If you take what you have
> and hack colorForth to work on that, this would count for having
> colorForth run on more hardware.

Not quite, it would mean another colorforth running on yet another
piece of hardware. I want the ratio forths versus machines down. I
wouldn't mind thousands of programmers trying out colorforth because
it runs on their machines. I want to go to my old friend Arie
Kattenberg (who acquainted me with Forth in the seventies and was the
leader of a meta compiler working group) and say: "Here! A
colorforth". Now he has given up, because he is not a hardware guy.
At least what contributions I can make I will make available.

> This would be sufficient to start
> developing with colorForth, but then, I don't really know what your
> interest in colorForth is.

I explained (but it was a long time ago), that I try to do some ai
with a system booting in Forth. I have designed a Forth for that
(around ANSI). But the problems in booting are considerable, and those
problems are partly common with colorforth. The spinoff was the
reverse engineering system ciasdis . Now ciasdis too has become a
target in its own right. With respect to that colorforth serves as a
test case. Knowledge gained for booting colorforth would be of value
for my ai forth.

I'm in the habit of organising my work for accessability. On my site
you will find two classic games that I wanted to play (rogue and
dungeon/zork), that are now readily compiled on Linux. For rogue e.g.
I combined a dozen shell archives with patches, an ancient art that is
all but lost. So although theoretically Unix rogue was "on the
internet" in practice it was not. That is the way I do things, it
doesn't stop where I myself can play such a game.

Then of course like everybody I marvel at the compactness of all this
colorforth code out there, and wonder whether I could be part of it.
I'm interested in algorithms, and recently I started a thread in
comp.lang.forth with a program to count primes. (It was improved
during the thread and Anton Ertl in the end counted 10^16 in 30 hours,
64 bit machine, huge memory.) This would be fun to run on colorforth
too. Google for sbpcp if you're interested.

> Mark

Groetjes Albert

--
Albert van der Horst,Oranjestr 8,3511 RA UTRECHT,THE NETHERLANDS
Economic growth -- like all pyramid schemes -- ultimately falters.
[email protected] http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst