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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: PYGMY Forth
Message-ID: <1590.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 24 Aug 90 03:44:27 GMT
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 46

Category 1,  Topic 45
Message 36        Wed Aug 22, 1990
F.SERGEANT [Frank]           at 22:37 CDT
 
 To Jan Hofland
 JH> First, I want to thank you for the 68hc11 assembler you 
 JH> implemented for Jack Brown.  Jack tells me that you did it not 
 JH> ever using the chip. Well done!

 You're very welcome.  Thanks for the encouragement.  Yes, the  assembler was
meant as a little joke (I like good jokes, not bad  jokes).  He'd been asking
if anyone knew of a pd 'HC11 assembler, so I  whipped one up for him as a
surprise.  It was something I wanted anyway  for my own use, as I planned to
wire up an 'HC11 and thought I would  need the assembler soon.  Unfortunately,
I STILL haven't got to the  'HC11 project.  I was expecting error reports, as
not using it, I  didn't feel like testing it exhaustively.  I then planned to
fix any  problems, but Jack fixed them himself!  I didn't mean to put him to 
that much work, just the work of noting errors.

 Digital hardware designer, huh?  What sort of things do you work on?   That
area is of great interest to me.  Maybe I'm an anti digital  hardware designer
(digital anti-hardware designer?) as I find one of  the most beautiful things
in the world to be eliminating/replacing the  hardware with software.  Of
course, it all depends on hardware in the  end.

 Say, is that simple Forth you want to write destined for any  particular uP? 
If it just happens to be for an 'HC11 (or any of its  subsets, such as '00 or
'01 or maybe '05) then you already HAVE the  assembler for it and you already
HAVE a metacompiling Forth (Pygmy).   The 'HC11 assembler as I originally
posted it was all set up to run  under Pygmy, so refer to that, but
incorporate Jack's corrections, but  not his changes for a different Forth. 
Then, it should be a simple  matter to re-write all the primitives for the
'HC11 and use Pygmy to  meta-(cross)-compile the new version.  You won't need
the editor, etc,  to run it as an "umbilical" Forth (use the PC as terminal &
disk server  & connect to the 'HC11 board via a serial line).  That's what I'm
going  to do when I get around to it.  I've already done it with a Zilog 
Super-8.  If you are going to try this, start by re-meta-compiling  Pygmy,
which I think you'll find to be very easy, to get some practice.   If you plan
to ROM the 'HC11 version, the trick is to declare the  variables the same way
the system variables are declared (eg, with  CONSTANTs - see RAM in PYGMY.SCR
for more details).  Hopefully, v 1.3  will be ready in time to help.

  -- Frank
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