Far far away -- Taiwan's Forth Interest Group.
LoopyByteloose
Posts: 12,537
I have mentioned before that Taiwan has one of the few remaining active FIG groups.
It is actually way to the north, in Hsin Chu -- the Silicon Valley of Taiwan, aka the windy city. And the website is nearly all in Chinese.
Nevertheless, I have managed to breakthrough on some level. So I am shamelessly posting this copy of the email text I got today.
C.Chin <cherngchin@gmail.com>
11:21 PM (20 minutes ago)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
to me, 賴溱君, 陳爽
Dear George,
I am Cherng , the Chairman of FigTaiwan . and a professor of Providence University .
It so happy to hear from you , and feel so warm before the Maker Faire in Taipei.
If you like to show some Propeller Forth project in Maker Faire in Taipei , you are welcome, FigTaiwan are family of Forther , so you are our family forever.
My cell phone is xxxx-xxx-xxx , and that is my Facetime ID too, both my Skype and LINE ID is cherngchin , you can contact with me anytime.
We are very interesting in Propeller especially in FPGA to implement Forth enhance SoC version with Xilinx Spartan 6 plus LPDDR.
https://www.parallax.com/microcontrollers/propeller-1-open-source
Best Regards!
Sincerely Yours
Cherng Chin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My dilemma remains that I rarely go north. In nearly 20 years, I have only been to Taipei for 3 days and HsinChu for one day. But I have offered to provide them with a few of the Propeller Project Boards, ver. C at my cost (I got mine in the clearance sale) with their choice of Forth pre-loaded.
So far no takers. But they are indeed aware that Propeller on Forth is alive and well.
I suspect that Cherng Chin would be pleased to hear from people that are more up to speed about Forth in a Propeller than myself. So I have posted this here without the cell phone.
If you do chose to contact him, please mention my referal and please be polite... it is all so that more may enjoy the Propeller.
It is actually way to the north, in Hsin Chu -- the Silicon Valley of Taiwan, aka the windy city. And the website is nearly all in Chinese.
Nevertheless, I have managed to breakthrough on some level. So I am shamelessly posting this copy of the email text I got today.
C.Chin <cherngchin@gmail.com>
11:21 PM (20 minutes ago)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
to me, 賴溱君, 陳爽
Dear George,
I am Cherng , the Chairman of FigTaiwan . and a professor of Providence University .
It so happy to hear from you , and feel so warm before the Maker Faire in Taipei.
If you like to show some Propeller Forth project in Maker Faire in Taipei , you are welcome, FigTaiwan are family of Forther , so you are our family forever.
My cell phone is xxxx-xxx-xxx , and that is my Facetime ID too, both my Skype and LINE ID is cherngchin , you can contact with me anytime.
We are very interesting in Propeller especially in FPGA to implement Forth enhance SoC version with Xilinx Spartan 6 plus LPDDR.
https://www.parallax.com/microcontrollers/propeller-1-open-source
Best Regards!
Sincerely Yours
Cherng Chin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My dilemma remains that I rarely go north. In nearly 20 years, I have only been to Taipei for 3 days and HsinChu for one day. But I have offered to provide them with a few of the Propeller Project Boards, ver. C at my cost (I got mine in the clearance sale) with their choice of Forth pre-loaded.
So far no takers. But they are indeed aware that Propeller on Forth is alive and well.
I suspect that Cherng Chin would be pleased to hear from people that are more up to speed about Forth in a Propeller than myself. So I have posted this here without the cell phone.
If you do chose to contact him, please mention my referal and please be polite... it is all so that more may enjoy the Propeller.
Comments
Skype allows one to ignore unknown callers, and LINE is a Smart phone app with filtering.
Maybe available outside Taiwan and Japan, is it? It says it is available in 230 countries, but the world doesn't have 230 countries yet. The U.N. only recognizes 196, excludes the Vatican, Taiwan, maybe Palestine, and various other regions.
============
More to the point, I would not have posted the contact info if I actually thought it would create problems. Being a professor in Taiwan generally is very much about talking to everyone. My own students tend to call me anywhere from 8AM until 12 Midnight. But from 10PM to 8AM, my smartphone blocks all but a few select callers.
Unless you have some special moderator rights to read my text as I write it (I suspect they can), you appear to be imagining things... and trying to micro-manage on that basis.
It there any 'last editted ....' on posting #1? Nope. So you seem to have not fully read it. Thus, the imaginary redaction. Heh, heh..... gotcha.
The Taiwan FIG is currently meeting in New Taipei City (the Taipei suburbs), not Hsin Chu. And the Chairman of the FIG works in TaiChung.
Also, a quick check of national flags in the world offers up 254 nations, compared to the U.N. membership of 196... not so sure of where 230 comes in.
http://www.freeflagicons.com/list/
I have long taught the need to get an English list of the nations of the world as their Chinese listings are phonetically different. But I have never gotten over something like 212. It seems there are a lot of tiny island nations that never joined the U.N.
Have you ever hear of the Aland Islands? That is one of the new nations for me, near Norway - but speaks Swedish. Live and learn...
I feel like I'm in the frikken matrix. There is no spoon...
The "last edited" note doesn't appear if the post is edited within a few minutes of posting.
Who made Heater boss? I already told you what I recall I did. That is the best I can remember. The 'last edited...' might be omitted if editted within a few minues of posting, but that is new information to me.
In any event, if I did go back and remove it, it was before you actually posted a suggestion to do so. This is all moot. I intended to post without the phone number.
A tempest in a teapot.
This is nothing about being "boss". This is about you saying "So you seem to have not fully read it. Thus, the imaginary redaction. Heh, heh..... gotcha." Which was not true. Nothing more nothing less. End of bickering ... for today
John,
You might wish you had not asked that question.
A language being old is no good reason not to use it. Fortran appeared in 1957 and is still in widespread use today. Forth is actually quite new, dating from the early 1970's.
Languages like Python are only practical if you have huge amount of memory a speedy processor and are not worried about any of the timing guarantees required in real-time systems.
C/C++ is of course great. A little problematic on the Propeller which cannot execute compiled code at native speed. Also that compiled code tends to be rather large limiting the amount of functionality one can fit in a Prop using C/C++
Forth, well, I can't get on with it but people round here have shown you can do magical things with it on the Propeller.
Forth is a delightful way to explore and verify the features of the Propeller with an interpretted language instead of a compiled language. In the early days of personal computers it was quite popular as it allowed one to explore and verify hardware addons.
It can still be used today in that manner. For instance, if you buy a cheap Arduino addon, you often have to verify that the interface and board is working right. In Forth, you can do your initial bench tests from whatever documents are available, and observe immediate success or problems (such as the need for pullup resistors or timing constraints). The average Arduino user just Googles and begs someone else to write a library that they can use -- ignoring learning how to interface the devices themselves.
Personally, I think it have a very useful role to play in helping users comprehend how the Propeller really works. It also emphasises that interger maths are at the heart of computation. Dependency on floating point decimal is more about what humans have adapted to. Binary maths, accumulators, and counters have a limited range of numbers. Fractions that are not base two tend to require more resources.
By studying Forth and the Spin source code (with PASM), one can get eventually transfer their knowledge to master the fundamentals of PASM. It helped me a great deal.
+++++++++++
The Propeller actually hits upon a ''sweet spot" for Forth deployment.
32Kb hub ram allows both the Forth interpreter and a decent size Forth dictionary to exist. 32bit Forth adds a lot more power to maths and timing over 8bit Forth. And having 8 CPUs that share the same Forth dictionary is both unusual and a very innovative improvement in using Forth.
The 8 CPUs and shared Forth dictionary allows extremely flexible multi-tasking that can morph endless into new processes on demand.
PropForth and Tachyon Forth are more adapted to exploiting all 8 CPUs, but less close to the ANSI Forth 83. pfth Forth is close to ANSI Forth 83, but requires a bit more effort in code to launch and retire Cogs.
I am sending a few of the Propeller Proto Boards, Ver.C. that I grabbed in their clearance sale last December, preloaded with Forth. I'll put them in the local mail sometime this week along with some supporting material, maybe a DVD full of Parallax documentation, and so on.
It looks like I am going to ended going north in a month or two to attend the monthly FIG gathering and have some sort of show and tell about the Propeller and Forth on the Propeller. He says most of the group speak English, so I shouldn't have a lot of difficulty.
My great area of weakness is the FPGA Propeller and he seems to be very keen on that, with possibly others interested as well. I suspect that technical universities in Taiwan are doing a lot with FPGA platforms. I have heard claims of such and it seems the more ambitious students like them as a blank slate for creativity.
And so, this may be the start of another interesting adventure.