Re: Forth reinvention

From	"Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.forth
Subject	Re: Forth reinvention
Date	2014-02-21 12:38 +0000
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<le7hcn$2nm$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References	<b5ec955a-146f-41ea-a227-22e4224cab49@googlegroups.com> <o7KdncO2m9MJxJvOnZ2dnUVZ_tOdnZ2d@supernews.com> <le5pq8$ie9$1@dont-email.me> <UpSdnZ24iMXIM5vOnZ2dnUVZ_hqdnZ2d@supernews.com>

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on 21/02/2014 01:39:30, "Elizabeth D. Rather" wrote:
> On 2/20/14 10:50 AM, Alex McDonald wrote:
>> on 20/02/2014 19:37:55, "Elizabeth D. Rather" wrote:
>>> On 2/19/14 11:19 PM, dambere@web.de wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>> - Automatic parallelization:
>>>> The trend goes to multi core architectures. A programming language that is relieving the programmer
>> from the not inconsiderable task of paralleling programs will necessarily
>> be attractive. >
>>> Parallelization is an implementation strategy, not a language feature.
>>
>> Here I disagree, and very strongly indeed. Concurrent and parallel
>> progamming demand languages that allow more than just task or process
>> management. There are many forms; SIMD, parallel execution on tightly
>> coupled, loosely coupled and decoupled systems, shared distributed
>> memory, concurrent actor models, future and promise models -- heck, a
>> huge slew of parallel & concurrent stuff where the language is the
>> difference between being able to do something and not being able to
>> express yourself at all. And no, it's not just libraries or
>> implementation strategy.
> 
> Do you have an example?

Yes. There's no way in Forth-the-language to specify an atomic operation
for X 1 +!. Interestingly, it doesn't need multi-core for it to be a
potential source of errors. That code isn't even guaranteed to be atomic
on a single processor if it uses pre-emptive interrupts and the interrupt
routine writes to X. Without basic atomic operation support, we can't
support locks or semaphores in Forth.

> 
> There seem to be lots of multi-core architectures out there nowadays,
> but I haven't heard of a "new language" in which everything has to be
> re-written in order to run on them. If programs written in C, C++,
> Java, or whatever are now suddenly running parallel, surely that's
> because the underlying components have been structured to enable the
> parallel architecture.

Of course, the hardware got there first. Much of my career has been spent
chasing the "good ideas" that hardware designers put in their offerings.
But languages must eventually catch up, because doing stuff like an
atomic increment is but one of the issues where language assistance is
essential if the concepts are to be transportable across architectures.
Not just OSes, but chipsets too.

It's not just multi-core either; that happens to be one of many ways of
parallel processing, the two major categories being task and data
parallelism. As an example of data parallelism I mentioned SIMD. Many
languages find it very hard to take advantage of instruction level
parallelism. Microsoft's latest & greatest C++ compiler barely supports
SSE2, and requires the use of extensive pragmas to help out the compiler.
Moving the pragmas into the language will help. See a great Intel
exposition of the issue here;
http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1612.pdf

Forth is a bit of a laggard in this respect. Much of the ANS
specification is suitsble for single core processors with no SIMD and
non-preemptive scheduling to support concurrent programming. Now, it may
be that this was a suitable target yesterday, and remains a suitable
target today for resource constrained low end systems. But even cheap
chips are way beyond that now, and with Forths targeting desktop or
server class machines, we need task and data parallelism constructs built
into the language.

> 
> Cheers,
> Elizabeth
>

Thread

Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 01:19 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 05:07 -0500
    Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 14:56 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 16:16 -0500
        Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 23:25 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 20:42 -0500
            Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 12:41 +0000
  Re: Forth reinvention Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2014-02-20 11:18 +0100
    Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 02:36 -0800
      Re: Forth reinvention Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2014-02-20 17:35 +0100
        Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 11:34 -0800
          Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 09:53 -1000
          Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-20 12:23 -0800
            Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 14:00 -0800
              Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-20 14:23 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-22 02:21 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention AKK <akk@nospam.org> - 2014-02-22 12:02 +0100
              Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-21 04:38 -0600
          Re: Forth reinvention Mark Wills <markrobertwills@yahoo.co.uk> - 2014-02-20 12:35 -0800
            Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-20 13:38 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention m.a.m.hendrix@tue.nl - 2014-02-20 03:59 -0800
    Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 15:11 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention m.a.m.hendrix@tue.nl - 2014-02-20 07:41 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention Richard Owlett <rowlett@pcnetinc.com> - 2014-02-20 06:38 -0600
    Re: Forth reinvention dambere@web.de - 2014-02-20 12:03 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention Julian Fondren <julian.fondren@gmail.com> - 2014-02-20 07:08 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 09:37 -1000
    Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-20 20:50 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 15:39 -1000
        Re: Forth reinvention albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-02-21 10:50 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention Paul E Bennett <Paul_E.Bennett@topmail.co.uk> - 2014-02-21 11:10 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 13:50 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-21 05:46 -0600
          Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 12:55 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-21 15:11 +0000
            Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-22 09:23 -0600
        Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 12:38 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-22 13:29 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-22 07:52 -1000
            Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-22 19:06 +0000
            Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-23 13:40 +0000
    Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-20 20:40 -0500
      Re: Forth reinvention "Elizabeth D. Rather" <erather@forth.com> - 2014-02-20 18:43 -1000
        Re: Forth reinvention Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> - 2014-02-21 13:16 +0100
      Re: Forth reinvention stephenXXX@mpeforth.com (Stephen Pelc) - 2014-02-21 10:49 +0000
    Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-21 14:50 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-21 16:28 +0000
        Re: Forth reinvention anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-02-22 12:54 +0000
          Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnohavenotit.cnm> - 2014-02-22 10:27 -0500
          Re: Forth reinvention "Alex McDonald" <blog@rivadpm.com> - 2014-02-22 17:49 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-21 20:51 +0100
        Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-22 09:39 -0600
          Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-23 02:40 +0100
            Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-22 19:24 -0800
              Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-23 22:48 +0100
            Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-23 04:39 -0600
              Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-23 22:46 +0100
                Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-02-23 14:26 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-02-24 02:44 +0100
                Re: Forth reinvention Spam@ControlQ.com - 2014-03-03 12:43 -0500
                Re: Forth reinvention Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-03-03 10:06 -0800
                Re: Forth reinvention Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-02-24 03:59 -0600
  Re: Forth reinvention mike73900@gmail.com - 2014-03-03 14:04 -0800
    Re: Forth reinvention mhx@iae.nl - 2014-03-05 06:59 -0800
      Re: Forth reinvention Matthias Koch <matthias.koch@hot.uni-hannover.de> - 2014-03-05 16:33 +0100
      Re: Forth reinvention Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2014-03-05 09:08 -0800
        Re: Forth reinvention mhx@iae.nl - 2014-03-05 10:47 -0800
  Re: Forth reinvention AKK <akk@nospam.org> - 2014-03-07 07:30 +0100
    Re: Forth reinvention Lars Brinkhoff <lars.spam@nocrew.org> - 2014-03-07 07:55 +0100
    Re: Forth reinvention albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-07 09:29 +0000
      Re: Forth reinvention AKK <akk@nospam.org> - 2014-03-07 12:04 +0100
      Re: Forth reinvention "Rod Pemberton" <dont_use_email@xnothavet.cqm> - 2014-03-07 17:03 -0500
        Re: Forth reinvention Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2014-03-08 05:31 -0800

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