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Floating point, finally
What is “floating point”? How do you represent a number like in a compressed and useful way in binary? Any computer science student will be able to tell you that you use a “floating point” representation and, like me a couple of months ago, could probably move on to a hand-wavy explanation that you stored […]
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Trusting the world of floating point
A lot of the everyday calculations we rely on depend on “floating point arithmetic” – in other words an approximation of accurrate mathematics and not actual accurate mathematics. For the last six weeks or so I have been working on bring floating point arithmetic to “Riscyforth” – my assembly-based implementation of Forth for Risc-V “single […]
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This summer’s to-do list
It’s easier to produce this list than it is fo do them, but producing the list is also a means of holding myself to account: Complete the code to translate a string into an IEEE754 floating point number in Riscyforth: I am now pretty clear in my own head what the algorithmic steps to do […]
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On Moldova
When I started this blog the intenetion was to stay off politcs, but some things are too important. I cannot say I am really an expert on Moldova but I have been there many times and worked as a political consultant for good and bad people there. One person I worked for ended up in […]
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How I actually extended Riscyforth
Before I suggested I was going to add dynamic linking by rolling on object files but that turned out to be pretty inflexible. Then I thought I could pass needed initialisation values via use of the gp register (using it as a stack pointer). That actually seemed to work but it was pointed out to […]
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Managed or unmanaged: funds and football
Some people are making a lot of money in the City of London and elsewhere by proactively managing investment funds (such as pensions) and charging a fee for their expertise? Are they worth it: the evidence doesn’t seem to be very clear. I am reminded of this by the consistent failure of my efforts to […]
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Adding dynamic linking to Riscyforth
This is one of those blogs one writes to clarify inchoate thoughts, so it’s sorry-not-sorry if it starts to wander around… Last week I got to an important point with Riscyforth, my Forth for RISC-V single board computers: I tagged my first release (v0.1). I did that because I had, finally, managed to cover all […]
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Getting Covid
The Government won’t tell you this – so I will – it wants (most) of us to catch Covid. And this week I complied. The Government aren’t out to get most of us infected because they are evil and want people to die. Instead they (I assume) see something like the following as good reasons […]
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Getting the POSTPONE word to work in Forth
I have struggled with this issue for several weeks now and I didn’t find the explanations in Starting Forth or the 2012 Forth standard or even the GForth documentation particularly enlightening, so I wanted to write this to – hopefully – add some clarity to anyone else trying to get this right in their own […]
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Mo Salah, penalties and artificial intelligence
Last night, as Leicester City played Liverpool, Mo Salah, current top scorer in the English Premiership, was taken down in the penalty box and then stepped up to take the (correctly-awarded) penalty. Salah hardly ever misses a penalty. It’s about as nailed on as you can get that he will score. Except last night he […]
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cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 