Bob La Quey wrote:
The Intellasys SeaForth 24 chip was designed with the tools that you are disparaging. How would you have designed such a chip?
Before you assign too much value to his tools, I would like to point out that chips of the complexity level of the SeaForth 24 were designed with far fewer tools.
The Intel 8080, Motorola 6800, RCA 1802, etc. were all done without any computer tools other than maybe calculators. Their design complexity looks quite a bit higher than the SeaForth from looking at the marketing literature. Although, the RCA 1802 might actually be comparable as it was quite a bit simpler than others of its time.
This does not disparage Chuck. VLSI design is hard no matter who does it.
The trick is understanding. Undestanding how to go from the chip level to much higher levels of architecture in a powerful hierarchy, which Forth makes relatively easy to do if you understand what it is that is to be done. If you don't have that understanding then Forth won't help you.
Agreed. And if you have that understanding, Forth probably doesn't multiply your force much.
An interesting experiment would be to see if Chuck's stuff could be duplicated in something like Lisp and how many lines of code that would take.
-a -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
