Snow!

[altivo]

Apparently a lot of it just north of the state line at the moment, but just an occasional flake here. At midday today, though, it was coming down hard. I had to sweep off my windshield when I left work at 12:30.

Woodpeckers are busy. We put out suet for them, and it is already attracting hordes of them. The Red bellied and Hairy are the largest, but the Downy are the most numerous. We also have dozens of chickadees and finches right now, and plenty of white breasted nuthatches. One red breasted nuthatch has been around. I hope he stays, they are one of my favorite winter birds. Bluejays and mourning doves are about, and a few juncos. Normally we have a lot of juncos as soon as the snow arrives, but they've been scarce so far this year.

Thought about putting a blanket on Tess and turning her out this afternoon, but I didn't. She hasn't had a blanket on in years, and I'm not sure how she'll react to it. I think I'll wait until I'm not alone to try that.

Found a Forth interpreter that loads on my old Tandy word processor that I used for NaNo. It's quite tiny, only 6200 bytes, but claims to be a full ANSI standard implementation. Got it to run, but I know nothing about Forth other than that it's stack-oriented RPN like PostScript. Have to find an introductory book and see what it can do.

It's 28F and dropping outside. Guess I should go start the woodstove and curl up there with a book.

Comments

[jmaynard.livejournal.com]

Forth is a stack-oriented RPN like PostScript in the same way that VMS is an operating system like Windows NT. PostScript was explicitly modeled on Forth.

vakkotaur can help you with Forth; he worked with it for years for a living.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

At midday today, though, it was coming down hard. I had to sweep off my windshield when I left work at 12:30.

We ended up hitting 70 sunny degrees today after a horrific windy, rainy early morning. Bizarre. Hard frost two days ago.

[deffox]

We only had a light dusting of snow today. Though the temperature is 0F and dropping.

We won't be starting the fireplace on account of their removing the chimney when they did roof work last summer.

[alaskawolf.livejournal.com]

wooodstoves are so nice to be around :)

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

FORTH IF HONK THEN

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I think that should be more like
: if.forth forth if honk then ;
if.forth HONK
OK

;p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I found Brodie's Starting Forth is online here.

The book is nearly as amusing as the language. Postfix still makes me feel like I'm standing on my head.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That doesn't sound very practical. ;p

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Except for the nuisance of bringing in more wood every so often and taking out the ashes, I agree. XD

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The weather is certainly not typical this year. It's been wacky every month.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

We only light ours at weekends. A mix of coal and wood is burned normally. I think it is great, but it is are not saving me the money I was hoping it would

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

It is an amusing book and shows how an introductory book should be written, I think - with a sense of fun and humor.

Postfix only seems strange for a little while, then everything else seems goofy. It's not all that different from assembler, which was rather the point really. I was amused by one former coworker who opined that while LISP and Forth had some similar philosophies, "LISP messed up and went with prefix and stuck itself with all those parenthesis." I have heard LISP expanded as Lost In Stupid Parenthesis.

The weird thing for me now is when a text goes on about C can 'do anything" and then proceeds to tell me all the things it won't let me do that I could do in Forth. And it took some time to not get annoyed when a simple operation, in almost any language, had to be complicated up some as there wasn't a convenient stack handy.

[murakozi.livejournal.com]

We're supposed to get rain tomorrow morning then snow. I'm rather glad it won't be a work day. I wouldn't wanna drive home from work in it with the drivers around here.

It probably sounds strange, but seeing birds clustered on a feeder when it's cold and grey and snowy is one of my favorite wintry type things. I dunno why.

Makes me wish I could put up a feeder at my apartment complex.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We do enjoy the birds, especially when we get some color on a gray day. The woodpeckers, cardinals, and bluejays look brilliant under those circumstances.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, all the assembly languages I ever learned use a "verb operand,operand..." structure that is more like the reverse of postfix to me. Since I learned three assembly languages before ever using any higher level stuff (except for FORTRAN for one term in college) postfix seems like Chinese or at least German. I understand the advantage of it for translation, but...

Anyway, Forth is amusing, unlike PostScript which made me want to tear my hair out. Do you know of a decent Forth for Linux environments?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You use it as a supplementary or alternative heat? What is the primary source you use, then?

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

The problem is that my house (like many working class Yorkshire homes of the period) never had central heating fitted to them in the 70s when everyone else did. I inherited a house that is very difficult to keep warm as a result. I am too tight to pay for someone to install central heating (cannot do it myself as there are new laws stopping that) or pay the Russians huge sums of money to keep it running.

We basically only heat the room we are using at any one time. If we are upstairs, then we will both have an oil filled radiator on. If we're downstairs, then the living room gas fire is lit with the door leading to the kitchen closed. We never heat a room that we're not in. That way it keeps the costs down.

At weekends however we fire up the multi fuel stove, and keep the doors open. The heat from the stove heats the whole of the downstairs, and warms the upstairs too, which then needs only a little boosting with the oil rads.

We also wear jumpers and slippers and use blankets.

The idea was to give the finger to energy companies which are constanly ramping up their rates, but it did not work out quite the way I planned as the stove I brought is not terribly efficiant. It WAS cheap however. I really need to stop going for the cheap option.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

We pay roughly 9p per kWh for electric and 4p per kWh for gas. Dunno how that equates to dollars.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

So the oil-filled radiators are electric I take it?

Yes, I was aware that many older homes in the UK did not have central heat. This was true in the US a century ago but changed sooner here. I've been told that many British believed that central heat was "unhealthy" or else "ostentatious" which corresponds to the attitude about air conditioning that prevailed here in the US midwest when I was a teen. Country farm houses sometimes still had only woodstoves or fireplaces, but most everything else had some form of central heat. I remember my grandparents' house had heat downstairs but not on the second floor. All that you had up there were vents in the floor that could be opened to allow warm air to rise up from below. Needless to say, in winter we had lots of blankets.

Heating individual rooms can be more efficient but it would probably help if the house had more insulation in the walls and ceilings than it likely does. Also that system works best if you don't move around a lot, obviously.

Stoves that burn wood, coal, or other fuels do vary tremendously in their efficiency. We have a midrange one that reroutes the hot combustion gases through the firebox a second time, giving an afterburner effect that increases heat efficiency and reduces chimney heat and partially burned gases such as carbon monoxide. It's still a pretty simple design and works best when you build a large hot fire which we only do when it is well below freezing outside, though.

A friend of ours has a woodstove with a catalytic smoke chamber of some sort. That one is a big investment to buy and install, but it works amazingly well. No larger than our stove physically, yet she heats a large two story house with four upstairs bedrooms on just that for much of the winter. It required a special chimney liner to be installed though, and it draws the air for combustion down through the flue, prewarming it on the way.

That also reduces the usual effects of a fireplace or woodstove, where it warms the area near the stove but chills the periphery of the house where cold air is drawn in through any gaps to feed the draft of the fire. We do have this problem in our house, making the living room cozy and the bedroom frigid when the stove is in use all day.

You must have your stovepipe or chimney all installed and such, so swapping out for a more efficient stove won't be as expensive as doing an entire installation when you get around to it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I haven't had natural or LP gas in the house for eleven years now, so have no idea what the prices are for that here. I think your electric rate is a bit higher than ours, but not so high as to double what we pay. I'm estimating about 2.5 US cents to your penny, which is probably a bit high on our end.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Aye..we had the chimney lined (which increases efficency at the cost of losing the warming effect that travels up the chimney to warm the upstairs), and the pipe is quite new. So it would be a case of a simple swap out if we went down that route. I will have to look into it. My sire gives me wood from his packing crates, and I find more of it here and there, but there is nothing quite as good (or quite as expensive) as real logs.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I expected that raw firewood such as we can get here would be scarcer and more expensive just about anywhere in EU or UK. I thought burning coal had been greatly discouraged over there because of the air pollution issues, too. Weren't the great London fogs of the late 19th and early 20th century partly blamed on coal smoke?

If I were to cut down my own oak trees and burn them in the winter, we might have enough here to last us 20 years at our present rate of consumption. It's easier, though, to buy wood that has been cleared from land being "developed" into housing tracts, even now when all real estate expansion and sales are at a near standstill. Why people want to buy houses on absolutely barren land that has had all the trees and most of the topsoil stripped away has always been one of the mysteries of life to me.

I was amazed when we bought our present house at the people who looked at photos and said "Ugh! What do you want all those trees for? Eww!"

Utterly weird.

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

Well, there's Fuzzball which has MUF... :P

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, though, there are some things which Forth makes unnecessarily complicated. (-- more --)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

If you try to do everything with the stack and only the stack, many things get unnecessarily complicated. Mucking about with the retrun stack, while convenient for some simple things, is generally best avoided whenever possible. That's why Forth has variables, too. I'll grant that array access, and strings, are not strong points in Forth.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I've never looked. I always that a Forth written in C or some other higher than assembly/machine code language (which is what you get in Linux) is... lacking, somehow. Forth was meant to run "on the bare metal" and anywhere it has this wrong feeling for me. Still, I suppose that for light hacking about it might of some use.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Suitable only for fuzzy logic, I think. Though perhaps thinking is never in order when it comes to Fuzzball.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I did some looking around yesterday. Here's what I found, for future reference.

I agree that the most practical applications of Forth are probably as you describe, and I gather you have some real experience with that. But for learning and exploring it is also nice to have some sort of emulation environment that runs on whatever you have handy (as with Hercules for IBM operating systems.) This also lets you test algorithms and ideas without needing special hardware.

It appears that GNU's gforth is a pretty complete ANS implemention, and I got it installed and running in about five minutes. You're correct that it's written largely in C, but for studying the ANS version of the language, it looks good. It should also be suitable as a development environment, since you can edit, save, and restore source as text files or forth blocks.

There are several other Forth implementations available to run on Linux, and some of them are in fact coded in pure machine language and simply use the Linux environment for a bootstrap and I/O system, with no library calls or C code at all outside of that. However, it seems that all such creations are non-standard as far as I could tell. That includes muforth, fig-forth, dforth, and others. You start reading the summaries and the authors say things like "We didn't like the ANS [or ISO] implementation of..." followed by convoluted arguments for why they did it their own particular or peculiar way.

The one that I got running on the Tandy WP-3 is called CamelForth, and is, underneath, the kind of implementation you describe. It exists to run standalone on various microprocessors such as the 8086, Z80, and 6809 and could be used for embedded controls. However, since it wasn't really designed as a development environment, it has no way to store, load, or edit program code. I guess it would normally be burned to a ROM along with the code, and stacks and working storage initialized at power on. Playable for trying little things, but not suited to actual development I think.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Heh. Using the return stack at all in the first Linux "implementation" I tested (something called lina) generates an instant segmentation fault. Every time.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I once encountered a very brittle bit of code that worked... it was evidently part of a crude multitasker setup:


R> R> SWAP >R >R


You can imagine the amount of pure boggle that generated when I encountered it - on a working system. Once I had an explanation, I very carefully left it alone.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

They might seem strange explanations, but I suspect almost all Forths used for actual production systems are not ANS compliant... and most Forth programmers don't like the ANS versions as they have their own weirdness or, to them, needless complexity.

Not having a good development environment where you can run, test, and save things seems a peculiarly shortsighted deficiency. I had been using one of Forth Inc.'s (older) products (Forth94, I think) cross-compiled from x86 to target the 68hc11.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that most practical uses of Forth would require some kind of cross-development facility. I was immediately puzzled about that apparent lack in Camel. I guess it has a major learning hump, eh?

I can understand that particular requirements might make non-standard features or implementations desirable. But if you want to be able to teach a language, a standard is needed. Also, some of these guys are altering the base primitives. I mean, what can be criticized about something as simple as EMIT? OK, fine, invent your own language then, but call it something else.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Amusing, but I don't imagine I'd think of Forth as a first choice when developing something that needed that kind of manipulations. Or if other reasons prevailed, I'd be working on a machine language routine that could be called...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That is certainly arcane. With my limited knowledge, I couldn't imagine a reason for it. However, I do remember seeing similarly arcane tricks when I first started working as an IBM 370 programmer. I had to support a system that was written under MFT and was designed to provide facilities more like MVS within itself. Later it was ported to MVS, but retained all those duplicate functionalities. Very puzzling to look at sometimes, as you might guess. Huge macro libraries and loadable function libraries. Clever as hell but so tricky that everyone was afraid to touch it.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Standards are good. The problem is that standards are developed by standards committees and the reuslt it the result of almost any committee. Monkeying with the primitives is annoying and silly, I agree. And yet, in example after example in Starting Forth I recall notes about the differences in a few Forths. The real weirdness I recall was that the Forth Interest Group's own version was curiously rather different from other Forths. One would have expected FIG to have gone as standard as they could. Or maybe they did at the time and the comittee changed the standards from what was in use to what they thought should be in use?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The makeup of the committee is crucial. In instances where commercial interests overbalance a standards committee, or where major user or developer groups either decide it isn't relevant and boycott it or are blocked from having representation, it does go off in weird directions. Both Microsoft and IBM have heavy-handedly shifted the direction of international computer language standards in that way. I know nothing about the history of the Forth standards development, so I can't say.

It seems to me, though, that in a language like Forth, you'd want to support the standard as completely as possible, and offer your own variations in addition. Build it so these bits are modular and the user can decide which ones to include in an actual installation.

Obviously the developer functionality is mostly going to be omitted in the production installation anyway, so you should design to allow trimming down of the kernel to the minimum required subset.