Re: Structured Programming using Forth

On Apr 5, 11:29 am, "Brad Eckert" <nospaambr...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 5, 5:52 am, "rickman" <gnu...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I am probably going to regret replying to your post, but I want to
address one thing. You said several times, that programming the
SeaForth chip is more like assembly language than a high level
language. I think you are ignoring the fact that Forth is
extensible.

But then with a 512 word program space there's only so much extending
you can do. They most likely have code for a TCP/IP stack left over
from the iTV venture. I'll go out on a limb here and say that the TCP/
IP stack won't fit in 512 words of code space. What will fit in that
space is an interpreter that implements a VM that executes TCP/IP code
resident in off-chip memory. Substantial applications would be written
in the language of the VM (Forth, if the Intellasys guys have their
way) with the VM containing some application specific primitives to
speed things up.

They use external memory, but it is not so they can run a Forth VM. I
don't recall where it read it, but they use the high speed comms to
download snippettes of forth as required. Chuck has even written code
that does this in very few instructions and then runs the code that
loaded starting just after the loader, IIRC.


I take more of a hardware view of the SeaForth processors. Each
processor is a replacement for hardware peripheral, a CPU, etc. IHMO
it's a pretty flexible way to define peripheral functions as long you
don't much analog involved. Kind of like an FPGA replacement but much
lower power. I would like to use it but its weak support for double
precision math (Chuck doesn't use double precision so the instruction
set doesn't support it) precludes its use.

I seem to recall that the initial application for the SeaForth chip
was home theater. That is something that requires more than 16 or 18
bits typically. I forget how wide the SeaForth word is, but typically
24 bits are used for HiFi audio. Is this chip 24 bit? If not, I
expect double precision math is being used.

I can see this chip being used in a lot of places, except for the
small memory size. Most programmers are not used to pr=ogramming for
such small memory sizes. They like to have big memory and have grown
to expect it... no, *depend* on it!

.

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