Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!enea!tut!santra!kolvi!mea
From: mea@kolvi.hut.fi (Matti Aarnio)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: FORTH and memory
Message-ID: <132@kolvi.hut.fi>
Date: 31 Jul 88 01:54:57 GMT
References: <ZMLEB@SCFVM> <8807211846.AA27919@jade.berkeley.edu> <9428@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <2353@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1530@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk>
Reply-To: mea@kolvi.UUCP (Matti Aarnio)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 36

In article <1530@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> orr%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk (Fraser Orr) writes:
>In article <2353@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies) writes:
>>The argument that FORTH is less desirable because large amounts of memory
>>are now common, is one-sided. Sure, FORTH is no longer the _only_ way to
>>make toy, home computers do useful work without resorting to assembler, but
>>the fact that Megs of memory are now available to be squandered doesn't
>>make it virtuous to do so...

  I believe you haven't heard about single-chip processors and their
limitations concerning amount of memories available.

  Presently I have a project (hobby :-) where I plan to use 68HC11 without
expensive mask programing (its my 3 units I need, not 10 000).
Alternatives I seem to have are to program in assembler (free ram is 128
BYTES, EEPROM 3-5 kB depening on version, mask programmable ROM left unused)
or grab an preprogrammed FORTH core for it, and add my application to EEPROM
area. (still that 3-5 kB!)

>(Surely everyone has heard the story of the programmer who was very proud of
>his sorting routine written in assembler, that he had spent ages cutting one
>microscend of the inner loop here, and 23 microseconds off the loop preamble.
>what he forgot to mention was that it was a bubble sort, because n.log(n)
>sorts were too hard to code in assembler:-)

 Shell-Metzner (sp?) (aka Shell) -sort isn't too complex.
Once I coded Shell to replace bubble in one assemblers symbol table output
routines -- using assembler.  That may be bad with IBM/370, but 6502 was nice.
(I was compiling FIG-FORTHs for Apple-2 back then :-) -- it had funny memory
 layout due to computers high resolution graphics memorys location, but it did
 work nice.)

    /Matti Aarnio
University of Turku, Wihuri physical laboratory, SF-20500 Turku, Finland
 UUCP: mea@kolvi.hut.fi BITNET: fys-ma@fintuvm.bitnet
(UUCP maybe: mea@fintuvm.utu.fi )
Present toys: IBM-3033 with UNIX V.0, Amiga 2000, some PCs