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Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words

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Assad Ebrahim wrote:

> On Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:30:40 +0100, Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de>
> wrote:
> 
>> can get Gforth from the Play Store.
> 
> 
> Bernd:
> 
> I saw this and downloaded GForth for Android onto my Samsung phone.
> 
> Well, after starting up nothing happened for a while, so I killed the
> program...  and appear to have crashed my phone -- as it it does not
> work or boot.

Not even boot?  You've got it bricked?  Wow ;-).

You can kill Gforth just fine, it does no harm to the phone (I kill it 
frequently, after all, it's a Forth system and there's a chance crashing 
even Gforth so hard that you need to kill it), and then you start it again, 
and you don't need to wait for unpacking.

> A little googling came up with the following:
> 
> "Starting the app first time unpacks the Gforth sources to the SD
> card. That's a few megabytes, and therefore it takes its time.
> Gforth's loader can't display any status at this stage, and won't
> respond to inputs, so just be patient."
> (http://www.forth-ev.de/wiki/doku.php/en:projects:gforth-android:start)
> 
> Ahhh...  now I am told ;)
> 
> So, a suggestion: perhaps have the start screen show a small message
> like "Please Wait - this may take a few minutes the first time..."

On any reasonable phone you won't even notice this time.  This "just be 
patient" is for people who have /sdcard on a slow extern real SD-card.

> and an (!) warning icon, perhaps even -- while unpacking do NOT exit
> the application...

It is totally harmless to exit the application while unpacking.  If it 
hasn't completed, it will so next time.  If it has completed, it will know 
that and not unpack next time (this is trivial to do: as last step, I write 
a file containing a sha256-checksum of all the files - to verify that the 
unpacking did work, I read that file in and check for the correct checksum).  
This stuff is meant to be fool-proof.  Your story is the weirdest thing I've 
heard.  No, you can't brick a phone by installing an app that writes a few 
megabytes into /sdcard.  Ok, maybe if /sdcard is already almost full, and 
the rest of the system needs some free space there.

About displaying something: As I wrote, at that point in time I have 
absolutely *nothing*.  Not even control over the screen, just a small 
program that can unpack stuff.  So I can't display anything.  To gain 
control, I must unpack all this stuff and then load it into the Forth 
system.  You know, I need OpenGL, I need JNI, I need a Gforth image, all 
that stuff has to be unpacked before it can be used.

> That could potentially save a few less patient souls like myself
> several hours of having to figuring out now how to get my phone to
> turn on and restored to a working state  ;)

Did you manage it?  But you didn't find the root cause?  What I can imagine 
is that your /sdcard was full, and the files couldn't be extracted correctly 
- and then trying to run a corrupted Gforth image caused some harm.

> (But I look forward to trying GForth for Android once that's done... )

I probably can fix that with the recent changes, since I've got rid of the 
native activity and have my own activity.  This activity could display 
something (a popup window showing a spinning wheel or so) while the 
unpacking is going on, at least if it's taking more than 0.3s.  On my Galaxy 
Note 2 I see no difference between the unpacking start and the non-unpacking 
start; it's probably completely hidden in the animation (I can unpack during 
animation, but I have to wait for the animation to finish to display 
something).

-- 
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://bernd-paysan.de/

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Thread

+DO and programming without stack manipulation words anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-03-18 13:41 +0000
  Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-18 17:30 +0100
    Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-03-18 16:50 +0000
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-18 18:56 +0100
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2014-03-18 18:25 +0000
          Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-18 22:21 +0100
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-19 11:42 +0000
              Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-19 14:59 +0100
                Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Andrew Haley <andrew29@littlepinkcloud.invalid> - 2014-03-20 02:13 -0500
                Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-20 12:50 +0000
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Alexander Skobelev <al.skobelev@gmail.com> - 2014-03-19 20:47 -0700
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Alexander Skobelev <al.skobelev@gmail.com> - 2014-03-19 21:24 -0700
            Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Alexander Skobelev <al.skobelev@gmail.com> - 2014-03-19 23:35 -0700
          Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Mark Wills <markwills1970@gmail.com> - 2014-03-20 01:27 -0700
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2014-03-18 12:24 -0700
    Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-18 19:23 +0000
    Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Assad Ebrahim <assad.ebrahim@alum.swarthmore.edu> - 2014-03-19 18:36 +0000
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Spam@ControlQ.com - 2014-03-19 17:32 -0400
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-19 23:48 +0100
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-19 23:17 +0100
        Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Assad Ebrahim <assad.ebrahim@alum.swarthmore.edu> - 2014-03-20 01:47 +0000
          Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words Bernd Paysan <bernd.paysan@gmx.de> - 2014-03-20 23:00 +0100
      Re: +DO and programming without stack manipulation words albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl (Albert van der Horst) - 2014-03-20 13:00 +0000

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