So are you espousing exposing malleable future programmers to Forth, sort of like taking a little kid to a Chicken Pox party? ;-)
C.W.
I thought more like having a new driver tune-up a 1964 Jaguar XKE with left hand drive and then launch him into a traffic circle in downtown London....but then Chicken Pox would be less dangerous!
What does all of the Forth stuff have to do with SPIN or SPIN2 as the thread title would suggested?
It is no wonder that it is difficult to find information on the Parallax Fourms.
(Just Wondering)
Nothing what so ever!! (and it is a valid question/concern)
This is what happens and it would be nice if it would stop. I only talk about Forth when asked and if I do have something to say about it, I start a new thread or join an existing thread. I've been scolded and I've had the same things frustratingly happen to my attempts at single topic or focused discussion threads. It is frustrating and becomes tiring. But once it started, I should not have joined in but F---- has become a running joke for some folks. If you mention or read certain things in a thread, you will soon recognize who has been there! It's like dogs marking territory almost.
Pretty much anything you want to do is more easily written in assembler than Forth. Especially on the Propeller whose instruction set and architecture is so nice and simple. PASM is great.
Not only that but it will be faster. And about as portable from machine to machine. That is not at all.
Forth is not a programming language. It's a kind of weird abstraction of a machine that does not exist and offers no help to expressing higher level ideas.
..........................................
.............................................................................................. Argh! It's too hard to type on my tablet!
+ 1. It's great for reading the forum, books, etc. but not much fun if you need to type more than a few words.
So the question is can a Spin interpreter running in a COG run two or more threads of Spin code?
Or do we have two or more instances of the Spin interpreter running as threads in a COG each running a chunk of Spin?
What happens when one of those Spin threads want's to do a WAITPE or such? That stalls everything no matter which way you do the threading.
I don't know, just thinking....about all the worms in that can...:)
All valid points. Another problem may be hub access timing. AFAIK hubexec will only run at 1/2 the speed of cog programs due to hub access limitations so having two or more tasks running the spin interpreter in a single cog would probably make for pretty slow execution of the spin tasks.
So are you espousing exposing malleable future programmers to Forth, sort of like taking a little kid to a Chicken Pox party? ;-)
C.W.
Yeah, in a way. It's like the difference between being an outdoors kid, getting a little dirty, toughened up and being kept pristine, sheltered, indoors the whole time. Build up the immunities early in life, and later in life it pays dividends.
A young programmer, and I mean simply new to programming, not age, can and should have a few diverse experiences for perspective. Assembly language, Forth, C, Javascript, Perl maybe. There could be some good discussion on what makes sense, and in many of those discussions Forth would make sense.
From there, they do what they will. Some will grok it, and may well use it frequently. Others, and likely most others, won't or just don't align well and go off and do their thing as we all do.
The assembly language programmers come from somewhere, don't they? A lot of us came from the 8 bit times when assembly was flat out necessary to get any of the real magic out of the machines. Some systems incorporated it nicely. The Apple 2 had built in tools, monitor, line-assembler, BASIC. BBC Micro had BASIC with inline code setup nicely. Others required tools, a cartridge, or program to handle assembly language. Whatever.
Forth was available on many machines, and I wish I would have tried it back in the day. I learned some things now that would have been nice to think about over the years. Would have been a fine experience, and I know I would have very likely not progressed with it, because it's not well aligned to how I like to think about this stuff, where assembly, C, and more traditional HLL environments are, but I would have seen some benefit from the experience.
The systems programmers come from some place, as do the scripters, etc... Game programmers too. Graphics, video related things, are often difficult to get at without some exposure too.
BTW: This dynamic is precisely why I want SPIN to feature inline PASM this time around. Makes using PASM a complete "doddle" as Heater would put it. Some of us will take that and run, and we get some more PASM people, never a bad thing. Some of us will use it a little here and there to get through a pinch, and others may well see it's not for them and carry on with SPIN and other HLL environments. No worries.
BTW: This dynamic is precisely why I want SPIN to feature inline PASM this time around. Makes using PASM a complete "doddle" as Heater would put it. Some of us will take that and run, and we get some more PASM people, never a bad thing. Some of us will use it a little here and there to get through a pinch, and others may well see it's not for them and carry on with SPIN and other HLL environments. No worries.
I think this also will make it easier to introduce newcomers to PASM by easing into it first.
Yeah, and if they want to, they can simply stay focused on tight, effective bits that get the job done, without worrying so much about a lot of details SPIN would manage for them easily.
Parallax's time proven method is to first put out very minimal information that will really be of use only to experts. That's why you don't see me posting more in this particular forum.
Every once in a while, I just can't resist.
You are right about the masses of information around here. Everyone that first gets a look has the same issue... "geese..."
I have two replies...
first:
... go to the Altera forum or search google for D5M... this is Altera's digital camera. There are demo's all over showing almost every product with a D5M.
When you get to the forum you will find that most of the threads have one, two or three replies. This is because even the simplest question rarely gets answered.
What is a simple question? "I have seen a demo of the D5M hooked up to a DE-nano... but I can't find the code. Could you direct me?"
No answer... same question, time after time, no answer.
Get a sense of whether you would try to work with one of these. I chose the D5M example because I just went through this routine again... for about the third year in a row.
My second reply is:
There actually is a pathway for almost every kind of user to learn about the Propeller. There are pathways for absolute experts, who require completely different information than what is in the pathway for new users... and there is a successful path for just about everyone between these extremes.
To really appeal to the beginner, Parallax practically explains everything you would want to know about all kinds of thing that you never heard of.
The forums are as social as they are informative. This one is a hoot.
Comments
I thought more like having a new driver tune-up a 1964 Jaguar XKE with left hand drive and then launch him into a traffic circle in downtown London....but then Chicken Pox would be less dangerous!
It is no wonder that it is difficult to find information on the Parallax Fourms.
(Just Wondering)
Nothing what so ever!! (and it is a valid question/concern)
This is what happens and it would be nice if it would stop. I only talk about Forth when asked and if I do have something to say about it, I start a new thread or join an existing thread. I've been scolded and I've had the same things frustratingly happen to my attempts at single topic or focused discussion threads. It is frustrating and becomes tiring. But once it started, I should not have joined in but F---- has become a running joke for some folks. If you mention or read certain things in a thread, you will soon recognize who has been there! It's like dogs marking territory almost.
Take cover, hide your babies!
Hey, but here I am. The Forth Nemesis.
Pretty much anything you want to do is more easily written in assembler than Forth. Especially on the Propeller whose instruction set and architecture is so nice and simple. PASM is great.
Not only that but it will be faster. And about as portable from machine to machine. That is not at all.
Forth is not a programming language. It's a kind of weird abstraction of a machine that does not exist and offers no help to expressing higher level ideas.
Let play commence.
+ 1. It's great for reading the forum, books, etc. but not much fun if you need to type more than a few words.
All valid points. Another problem may be hub access timing. AFAIK hubexec will only run at 1/2 the speed of cog programs due to hub access limitations so having two or more tasks running the spin interpreter in a single cog would probably make for pretty slow execution of the spin tasks.
Hi mindrobots,
I think one really tricky thing is determining how much stack space to allocate.
HydraHacker
Yeah, in a way. It's like the difference between being an outdoors kid, getting a little dirty, toughened up and being kept pristine, sheltered, indoors the whole time. Build up the immunities early in life, and later in life it pays dividends.
A young programmer, and I mean simply new to programming, not age, can and should have a few diverse experiences for perspective. Assembly language, Forth, C, Javascript, Perl maybe. There could be some good discussion on what makes sense, and in many of those discussions Forth would make sense.
From there, they do what they will. Some will grok it, and may well use it frequently. Others, and likely most others, won't or just don't align well and go off and do their thing as we all do.
The assembly language programmers come from somewhere, don't they? A lot of us came from the 8 bit times when assembly was flat out necessary to get any of the real magic out of the machines. Some systems incorporated it nicely. The Apple 2 had built in tools, monitor, line-assembler, BASIC. BBC Micro had BASIC with inline code setup nicely. Others required tools, a cartridge, or program to handle assembly language. Whatever.
Forth was available on many machines, and I wish I would have tried it back in the day. I learned some things now that would have been nice to think about over the years. Would have been a fine experience, and I know I would have very likely not progressed with it, because it's not well aligned to how I like to think about this stuff, where assembly, C, and more traditional HLL environments are, but I would have seen some benefit from the experience.
The systems programmers come from some place, as do the scripters, etc... Game programmers too. Graphics, video related things, are often difficult to get at without some exposure too.
BTW: This dynamic is precisely why I want SPIN to feature inline PASM this time around. Makes using PASM a complete "doddle" as Heater would put it. Some of us will take that and run, and we get some more PASM people, never a bad thing. Some of us will use it a little here and there to get through a pinch, and others may well see it's not for them and carry on with SPIN and other HLL environments. No worries.
I think this also will make it easier to introduce newcomers to PASM by easing into it first.
Parallax's time proven method is to first put out very minimal information that will really be of use only to experts. That's why you don't see me posting more in this particular forum.
Every once in a while, I just can't resist.
You are right about the masses of information around here. Everyone that first gets a look has the same issue... "geese..."
I have two replies...
first:
... go to the Altera forum or search google for D5M... this is Altera's digital camera. There are demo's all over showing almost every product with a D5M.
When you get to the forum you will find that most of the threads have one, two or three replies. This is because even the simplest question rarely gets answered.
What is a simple question? "I have seen a demo of the D5M hooked up to a DE-nano... but I can't find the code. Could you direct me?"
No answer... same question, time after time, no answer.
Get a sense of whether you would try to work with one of these. I chose the D5M example because I just went through this routine again... for about the third year in a row.
My second reply is:
There actually is a pathway for almost every kind of user to learn about the Propeller. There are pathways for absolute experts, who require completely different information than what is in the pathway for new users... and there is a successful path for just about everyone between these extremes.
To really appeal to the beginner, Parallax practically explains everything you would want to know about all kinds of thing that you never heard of.
The forums are as social as they are informative. This one is a hoot.