Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: blocks and overlays question Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2016 12:36:46 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 43 Message-ID: <87eg455e41.fsf@jester.gateway.pace.com> References: <87inth5hk5.fsf@jester.gateway.pace.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="2aed369a7b4699bde3e169ff4d831123"; logging-data="11790"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19hlHD56uAgEE2ja+TD5QE7" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:+zsh45/w7CcZ8VKZ95BoTQA0vjs= sha1:UEsRsgUU9nPv1eI+OlTd0cZenyo= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:51398 albert@cherry.spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) writes: > There is hardly a tradition of overlays. Oh I didn't realize that. I know that they were used at least sometimes. But I guess you're saying you'd normally load some blocks and have them stay resident "forever". I guess that's reasonable. > This is the MSDOS era. 1. There was about 300K blocks utilities (with > 70K free an the floppy) and 230 K for the metacompilation system. OK, thanks. I see f83.com is just 25k or so, but I wondered about the utilities. Was it around the same in CP/M? > There are lots of small Forth's to take as an example > CamelForth, noforth etc. > No need to go back to the pre-ANSI F83. Oh, I didn't realize these had blocks and utilities. I'll take a look. > You also could have a look at my Renesas ciforth, with a similar > ram/flash configuration. The flash above 64k is used as a library of > blocks. This sounds good too. I remember playing with the 4th block editor but the general environment was rather different from traditional Forth. I just ran F83 under dosemu on Linux and it worked nicely, but I didn't try any of the blocks stuff. My idea (more a thought experiment than an intention to do anything real) is to have a gadget with an embedded MCU, but put a Forth interpreter in it for the purpose of allowing the user to set parameters and customize some things. And that leads to the desire to put in the complete code for the device, as blocks and screens, with a block editor etc., making it totally hackable with no external tools except a terminal. So I wondered if 20k ram and 64k flash was enough for that idea to be sound, assuming it's ok for the system and utilities to use up to half of the flash and ram. The specific Cortex M3 cpu on that board appears to be very cheap (less than an Atmega328 or the like). There's another version that's the same except for having 128k flash, that costs several times more, though still not much in the scheme of things.