Is, or has anyone done anything Re: Native FORTH implementation on 32bit
and/or 64 bit chips.

What I'm interested in specifically is PPC & CBE
[PPC = Power PC, CBE = Cell Broadband Engine]

Chuck Davis

Charles Davis wrote:

Back in the "Good Old Days" (mid 1970's), when FORTH was in it's
"infansy" so to speak.
The idea was to take a 'chip(CPU)', write a ~200 byte 'FORTH
microkernal' in machine code, use that 'microkernal' to write (in FORTH)
the balance of the needed 'kernel' of an OS, use that to write (in
FORTH) the rest of the 'FORTH machine', and then you could take off and
solve, (in FORTH), whatever problem you had to start with.

For example, my start using FORTH, was to take a 'Machine Code Listing'
of FORTH for the Z80 CPU, and translate that to 'Machine Code' for the
Motorola 6800 CPU. After the 'Microkernal', the rest was just typing in
the FORTH Definitions.

Today, I see little or no evidence of that method being applied to
todays CPUs. And I can't think of any valid reason why it SHOULDN't be
happening today.

Charles Davis gamewood.net> wrote:

It could be done. If you don't mind 5-bit instructions etc you could do
it with ColorForth. I've only heard about that getting ported to
x86-type systems but it could be done on anything.

Charles Davis wrote:

At last, someone deigned to make a reasonably coherent answer to my
questions.

Thanks Jonah

Continued thoughts interspersed below.

On Jul 15, 8:31 pm, Jonah Thomas gmail.com> wrote:

I don't know what point you were trying to make, but you seem very
confused about colorforth. You can use standard Forth or colorforth
to generate target code for Forth chips that have 5-bit
instructions.
That doesn't mean that everyone who uses standard Forth or that
everyone who uses colorforth has to deal with 5-bit instructions etc.

Chuck's colorforth implementations have all been inlined
native code and Pentium does not have 5-bit instructions.

There have been other colorforth variants, some for other platforms,
that were inspired by Chuck's Pentium colorforth.

Best Wishes

Charles Davis wrote:

Elizabeth D Rather wrote:

Charles Davis gamewood.net> wrote:

Sure, that part gets done repeatedly. MPE and Forth, Inc both have Forth
versions that they transport among many mnay CPUs. Sometimes they don't
get around to porting to a particular CPU until they have a customer
who'll pay them to do it for him, since there's some effort involved and
that way they're guaranteed at least one sale. EForth gets ported
widely. Etc.

But when you have a Forth running on a CPU you haven't gotten very far
toward a modern OS.

Charles Davis gamewood.net> wrote:

OK, I didn't notice you mention that part before.

You want the problems of managing a horde of hobbyists. That's a
reasonable thing to attempt.

There probably is not a vast array of Forth hobbyists now, or if there
is they're off doing what they're interested in and not getting involved
in much else. And they tend to be aging. Older people remember the days
when you could understand a whole computer system. Younger ones are
comfortable dealing with endless complexity -- they've never seen
anything else and if they don't like it they stay away from computers.

But let's say we can get a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of people
interested in the project.