Tag: Riscyforth
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Further thoughts on Forth (and Riscyforth in particular) and Life
It’s now two years since I began my Riscyforth project of writing a Forth for RISC-V single board computers. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I wrote my first serious/useful (if you like this sort of thing) program for it, a version of Conway’s Game of Life. (This program wasn’t as long as the unit…
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Game of Life animation
I’ve made some improvements to the program and so here’s an animation of the output.
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Conway’s Game of Life, in Forth
Forty-one years after I wrote my first version of this (in Z80 machine code for the ZX80/ZX81) here’s the latest, in Forth (Riscyforth for a RISC-V SBC). This is hot off the editor, so can no doubt be optimised, but I am pretty pleased with it.
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Write-only? A simple program translated from C to Forth
The old joke is that Forth is a “write-only language”. in other words, you can write this stuff but you cannot understand it (and hence maintain it). Of course, any endorsement of this view is regarded as a heresy amongst many in the Forth community, but I have to admit that sometimes the Forth-bashers have…
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New release of Riscyforth
There is a new release (0.7) of Riscyforth – my Forth for RISC-V based single board computers available – Riscyforth 0.7. This release adds significant support for 64-bit IEEE754 floating point numbers to broadly match the 2012 Forth standard. The implementation of the Forth floating point word set isn’t yet quite complete and Riscyforth does…
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The unreasonable ineffectiveness of arithmetic with floating point numbers
Eugene Wigner’s wrote a famous short essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” in 1960. To be honest I find it slightly underwhelming: to me mathematics is the abstraction from physical reality and not – as might be implied by Wigner – that our physical universe is a concretised subset of a…
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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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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…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 