Author: Heiner Marxen
Date: 18:19:01 09/19/01
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On September 19, 2001 at 20:04:42, Ian Osgood wrote: >The biggest catch is having to think in RPN! Forth is a very simple and compact >interpreted language. It can be implemented in as little as 2K (!). Thus, it >has found a niche in embedded systems and prototypes. I believe they are aiming >this chip at the embedded market (set-top web boxes). However, they have to >develop all their own software for it. > >Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth and these chips, is quite an iconoclast. He >actually wrote his own PC Forth OS and Forth VLSI CAD system to design and >simulate these chips. He can't understand why people buy big bloated operating >systems instead of writing their own. :) > >When I saw how deplorable their Forth chess program was (no quiescence, eval is >simply material and kings on first rank until the endgame), I started porting >TSCP to Forth for fun. What a headache! Migrating from C to Forth is hard; you >lose types and structures and local variables and all your C idioms. Forth is a >*very* idiomatic language, from what I can tell. Without knowledge of common >patterns, efficient Forth looks like so much line noise. Definitely a language >for Real Programmers (TM). Uuh, did you try APL? That is worse. Not long ago I tried to do some serious programming with "dc", the UNIX "desc calculator" with arbitrary precision numbers (that attracted me). I did not even manage to write an endless loop without infinite recursion. No, I did not try to do chess programming in "dc"... well, should I? Just kidding :-) >I thought that a chess program would make a good benchmark for this chip because >1) no floating point required, 2) requires little memory and small word size for >a basic engine, and 3) it can give you a real metric, nodes per second, which >this asynchronous chip currently lacks, having no clock speed as such. That appears to make sense. >Ian Cheers, Heiner
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