RE: [Vo]:Subject: FORTH computer language

[Hoyt A. Stearns Jr.]

Yes, I'm Scotty :-) .



I  professionally learned assembly language on the PDP-11 which was a 
beautifully designed CPU by Gordon Bell  -- simple and elegant.



( Correction, I first did programming on a Burroughs 220 and Control Data 1604

at Cornell where I had the run of the enormous computer room at night -- but 
that dates me

to the mid 60's . )



The Motorola 6809 and 68000 were also inspired.



Then came Intel, who never could tolerate simplicity and made everything, 
hardware and software unbelievably and uselessly complicated ( I sense

the designers came from the academic community. ) .



My favorite architecture is the PowerPC from IBM,  but the non-volatile FRAM 
devices ( MSP430FR from TI ) hail back to the old magnetic core memory

days which was also non-volatile, and the MSP430's have quite a decent 
instruction set to boot (pun not intended).



Hoyt Stearns

Scottsdale, Arizona US





From: Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson [mailto:orionwo...@charter.net]
Sent: Friday, September 4, 2015 7:58 AM
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
Subject: RE: [Vo]:Subject: FORTH computer language



Fun stuff there, Hoyt and Eric.



Hoyt, are you "Scotty?"



This brings up my early university studies of learning assembly language. 
Assembly & Machine language programming is another lost art within the computer 
science field. Few universities teach assembly language these days. That 
concerns me. Most programmers these days have no clue whatsoever as to what 
happens at the machine level.



I must confess learning assembly language for me had initially been 
excruciatingly difficult. It took a part-time McDonald's swing manager sitting 
me down during an evening break and explaining a fundamental machine language 
principle that had completely baffled me. Initially, I didn't understand the 
fact that instructions AND data could be stored interchangeably in the same 
locations of core memory. Once I understand the utter simplicity of that 
paradigm, there was no holding me back. Back then when I was a UW Madison 
student, I was working at a McDonalds store that catered to the lunch break of 
the University crowd. The swing manager who had obviously taken some CS 
courses, and who was instrumental in getting me to understand a major 
fundamental CS principal about low-level programming concepts, was himself a 
psychology major. Go figure. I hope he's doing well. He sure was helpful in 
straightening out some of my CS confusions.



Back then few beginning computer students had access to programming in an 
assembly language environment. Granted, there were a lot of PDP mini computers 
installed in the CS building, but you had to be a more advanced CS student in 
order to gain access to them and the machine instruction set. Those were 400+ 
level courses. For the masses: Fortran, Algol and Pascal were the rage. ... and 
nobody talked about COBOL. After all, the computer science department was an 
academic institution, not a business establishment. Of course, in my case, it 
was learning COBOL at Madison Area Technical College (located at the other side 
of town;-) ) that got me a good paying job that ultimately lasted 36 years 
working for the state of Wisconsin till I retired last December.



CS students learned assembly language by initially practicing with Donald's 
Knuth's MIX language. MIX was an elegant representation of a simulation of 
assembly language.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIX



I had a lot of fun learning how to program within a simulated core of 4k 
memory. MIX taught me how to be efficient in both compacting the size of my 
programs as well as making them execute quickly. In one contest I came in 2nd 
best for designing a program that was both the fastest as well as taking up as 
few machine instructions as possible within core memory. The class was assigned 
the task of adding up Fibonacci numbers. Someone in the class figured out how 
to do the same function with one less machine instruction than my program. I 
wish I had found out who that person was. I would have loved to have compared 
notes.



These days I use Microsoft Visual Studio Profession - 2013. I'll probably 
upgrade to 2015 or later version reasonably soon. My Kepler project is being 
written primarily in C#. It's a decent language.



Regards,

Steven Vincent Johnson

OrionWorks.com

zazzle.com/orionworks



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RE: [Vo]:Subject: FORTH computer language

[Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson]

Fun stuff there, Hoyt and Eric.

 

Hoyt, are you "Scotty?"

 

This brings up my early university studies of learning assembly language. 
Assembly & Machine language programming is another lost art within the computer 
science field. Few universities teach assembly language these days. That 
concerns me. Most programmers these days have no clue whatsoever as to what 
happens at the machine level. 

 

I must confess learning assembly language for me had initially been 
excruciatingly difficult. It took a part-time McDonald's swing manager sitting 
me down during an evening break and explaining a fundamental machine language 
principle that had completely baffled me. Initially, I didn't understand the 
fact that instructions AND data could be stored interchangeably in the same 
locations of core memory. Once I understand the utter simplicity of that 
paradigm, there was no holding me back. Back then when I was a UW Madison 
student, I was working at a McDonalds store that catered to the lunch break of 
the University crowd. The swing manager who had obviously taken some CS 
courses, and who was instrumental in getting me to understand a major 
fundamental CS principal about low-level programming concepts, was himself a 
psychology major. Go figure. I hope he's doing well. He sure was helpful in 
straightening out some of my CS confusions.

 

Back then few beginning computer students had access to programming in an 
assembly language environment. Granted, there were a lot of PDP mini computers 
installed in the CS building, but you had to be a more advanced CS student in 
order to gain access to them and the machine instruction set. Those were 400+ 
level courses. For the masses: Fortran, Algol and Pascal were the rage. ... and 
nobody talked about COBOL. After all, the computer science department was an 
academic institution, not a business establishment. Of course, in my case, it 
was learning COBOL at Madison Area Technical College (located at the other side 
of town;-) ) that got me a good paying job that ultimately lasted 36 years 
working for the state of Wisconsin till I retired last December.

 

CS students learned assembly language by initially practicing with Donald's 
Knuth's MIX language. MIX was an elegant representation of a simulation of 
assembly language.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIX

 

I had a lot of fun learning how to program within a simulated core of 4k 
memory. MIX taught me how to be efficient in both compacting the size of my 
programs as well as making them execute quickly. In one contest I came in 2nd 
best for designing a program that was both the fastest as well as taking up as 
few machine instructions as possible within core memory. The class was assigned 
the task of adding up Fibonacci numbers. Someone in the class figured out how 
to do the same function with one less machine instruction than my program. I 
wish I had found out who that person was. I would have loved to have compared 
notes.

 

These days I use Microsoft Visual Studio Profession - 2013. I'll probably 
upgrade to 2015 or later version reasonably soon. My Kepler project is being 
written primarily in C#. It's a decent language.

 

Regards,

Steven Vincent Johnson

OrionWorks.com

zazzle.com/orionworks

RE: [Vo]:Subject: FORTH computer language

[Hoyt A. Stearns Jr.]

I'm hoping to shift software development training away from the current 
academic paradigms which

always seemed to me to be designed by folks who never actually designed any 
real products or worked

at a real company ...



Most of my professional career I've used FORTH as the preferred computer 
language when the employer didn't care what language was used ( however, most 
want C which I am fluent in and accommodated them with. ).



FORTH is really quite amazing I think, I can have the entire development system 
online and running on the target devices ready to be reprogrammed or adjusted 
or even completely recompiled whilst still running the application the customer 
is using!



FORTH also has a much higher level of abstractions available than other 
languages, it can redefine and re-compile itself on the fly.





My latest FORTH masterpiece is at Stimwave.com which is working really well, 
and it can do in 16k Bytes what would

take 16 megaBytes with conventional designs  ( I know, memory is free now so 
who cares how much you waste :-) but this

FRAM processor doesn't have that much. )





( Scotty in the pictures   )







Hoyt Stearns

Scottsdale, Arizona US







From: Robert Ellefson [mailto:vortex-h...@e2ke.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2015 1:50 PM
To: vortex-l@eskimo.com
Subject: RE: [Vo]:Subject: off topic android







From: Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2015 
9:20 AM

FORTH is an interesting RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) programming language. 
Quite primitive, but deceptively powerful once you get a handle of it.



I already liked RPN from using and programming my HP 11c calculator, but when I 
started working on hardware design at Sun in the early 90’s I really fell in 
love with Forth, since their boot monitor was implemented with it.  For 
hardware debug, this was great, because I could write all kinds of hardware 
diagnostics and stimulus loops with very little effort, and I didn’t need to 
boot the OS to get a lot of lab work done.  Working on hardware without a 
decent, programmable boot monitor has never been the same for me since.



-Bob





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