lebuffon

Open Firmware written by Mitch Bradley is actually just a byte-code Forth custom extended to be the system firmware. :)

So it's not that the language was specified but rather the language is the Firmware. By using byte-codes for the Forth keywords and allowing new wordlists to be created and extended you get a nice virtual machine that has the low-level chops to let you write device drivers and such, as you mentioned, while keeping the object code very small.

It quite clever. Unfortunately Forth itself is so "other" that it can never win the popularity contest. However like Lisp it is one of those mind expanding paradigms that should be sampled for the insights into minimalist computing that it provides.

It won't be extremely fast.

This was discussed in comp.lang.forth a few years back. It's very interesting as an instructional tool but is not optimal for GForth.

For example the symbol table is written in Forth whereas it would be faster to use GForth wordlists which give you a hashed lookup method.

There is a string-to-number routine written but GForth has >NUMBER which can handle double precision conversions and is in the kernel.

However it is all there and it works. For an experience Forth user it wouldn't take too much to improve it.

If it was compiled on a native code Forth compiler like SwiftForth, iForth or VFX and with a few better uses of the internal system resources it would be fast enough to useful I suspect.

An old book "The Fifth Generation Fallacy" (Unger) addresses this somewhat.

As I recall it speaks about the desire by the Japanese leadership of the time to build AI translation and related it to the challenge of full literacy in Japanese due to the requirement of learning 4 alphabets. Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji and Romanji.

Franck done this already for you:

http://www.oforth.com/

Also look at another next generation concatentive language: https://8th-dev.com/ Not object-oriented per se but a very comprehensive protected hi-level language/environment with "Forthy" origins.

524Kbytes of RAM and 8Mb of "bulk storage"

But I understood "2 ounces, 4 drams and 5 grains" to be a single measurement.

Correct. Three columns required, similar to the old British money system of Pounds, Shillings and Pence.

The elephant in the room is that some cultures consider dogs unclean. What to do when you as the driver, are a member of that culture and the rider wants to bring a dog into your taxi.

I suspect a royal chaos ensues...

"I been rich an' I been poor and rich is better"

                                Ella Fitzgerald

During Canada's transition to metric in the 1970's a lady called into the local radio station's call in program. She issued a challenge to anyone who supported the English system to call with the answer to this question:

What is 5/8ths of 2 ounces, 4 drams and 5 grains? :-)

She was an immigrant from Czechia and had to learn the British Apothecary system when she arrived in the 1950s. To her credit she had mastered it but it was lunacy.

It's worth remembering that large groups of fundamentalist Christians left Europe to go to the "new world" to escape actual persecution or the perception that they were not free to express their form of Christianity. Culture IMHO runs very deep and lasts long after the death of the originators.

This photo gives some perspective

https://globalnews.ca/news/7719176/suez-canal-ship-digger-ex...

Unicode lets you record the data but does not address the societal problem of record keeping in a way that all staff can use.

British Columbia has a very large population of Chinese speakers. If you allow multiple language script for every language you would still need a transliteration in English or French, since they are the common denominator languages. Same is true to for Cyrillic, Arabic and Korean, all of which are well represented in modern day Canadian society.

Some years back the City of Richmond BC was having difficulty in the fire department because they could not identify the names of some local businesses that called in because the signs were all in Chinese script. :)

Not sure how that has been or was actually rectified.

Just to show how language affects understanding, the word "charity" comes from the Latin caritas meaning something from the heart.

The semitic word used where English uses charity means more like justice or "do the right thing". It also implies that the right thing may in fact involve giving to those who have too little ie: they "deserve" more because they were dealt a bad hand, not because of their achievements.

This is interesting.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

In 1913 dollars a 10 cent can of soup is $2.66 USD today.

So at $1.00 in 2021 its a bargain. :)

I think modern manufacturing processes have made common items cheaper to produce and this is how the ordinary citizen has been able to survive 40 years with very little real wage movement. (my opinion)

Indeed the warming is a natural event. The glaciers melted long before humanity could make any difference.

The new bit is that we are helping it along at what is probably an unprecedented rate. So it's not about the change. It is about the rate of change.

When I was born the atmosphere had ~314 PPM of CO2. It is now north of 415PPM and going up ~2.5PPM per year. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

Now how could that relate to us requiring over 95,000,000 barrels of oil PER DAY to run our civilization? (it is closer to 98M in 2021)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/265203/global-oil-produc....

For perspective do some back of the napkin math on the height 98,000,000 barrels of oil would be if you made a 100x100 base of barrels and stacked them vertically. Standard drums have inside dimensions of 572 millimetres (22.5 in) diameter and 851 millimetres (33.5 in) height. (remember that's per day)

We have in all probability made the time when coastal cities are flooded happen sooner and it is highly unlikely that we can improve the situation very much in the short term.

"ancient history starts from the beginning of writing or recorded history"

Perhaps an unconscious bias of literate cultures. In the Canadian high arctic years ago, scientists discovered evidence of "paleo-eskimo" (bad name) peoples in the soil. These included more primitive hunting tools than were used by the Inuit people who were there when Europeans arrived.

They took to the tools to the village elders excited to show what they had found. The news story reported that the elders said (paraphrase) "Yes we know. These are the Tuliit people. We have songs about them" :-0

Made me chuckle too. In Montreal or Frankfurt the question would be "Why would you have lunch without your favourite beverage"?

The Puritans influence seems to have a long reach. (?)

Interesting that there are few comments here. :)

Very nice picture, but how does this advance the "flat earth theory"?

:)

... and Forth :)

The amateur radio frequencies that are "legal" for a ham operator to transmit on are well defined. If the NASA devices used Amateur frequencies for commercial work I believe they would be breaking US law as well. So the terms of the amateur license prohibit transmitting signals to the remote systems on Mars.

The practical requirements of getting a strong enough signal to Mars would require a big dish to focus the energy and some high power microwave equipment which make it more difficult but not impossible given enough resources. Then as you mentioned one needs to know the communication protocols.

BTW there were Ham built satellites in orbit, that piggybacked onto other missions. (OSCAR) Not sure if they are still in orbit. And again they used reserved spectrum for licensed experimental Amateur radio stations.

And for those interested in an FPGA version with similar features, check out the J1 and J1B (32 bit) CPUs by James Bowman.

Remarkable machines in 200(ish) lines of Verilog.

The Fedex handheld terminal was re-written in Forth... twice. :)

First time all the features wouldn't fit. Forth re-write fit with room to spare. (factoring is easy in Forth)

New Hardware! Everything fit but batteries didn't last a full shift. :(

Forth with a proprietary tasker put the device to sleep at every opportunity. Problem solved.

Or... is it possible that we are not supposed to meet the "others?

Consider: If you wanted to build a "terrarium" for sentient evolving life forms how would you keep them from escaping?

1. Make the distances really really big 2. Put a speed limit in the environment

Rolled up with the Fermi paradox this simulation has "smelled fishy" to me for some time. :)

Even "Communist" China now has a capitalist economy. :) But they don't have a Democratic government.

What should we call that? Totalitarian Capitalism?

"wiggle room" Exactly right.

I liken it to a control that you can turn to the left or the right. There are an infinite number of degrees in between.

My life experience seems to indicate that the control must be continuously tweaked, like a servo control, to keep a country working. Lock it one place and the system runs out of control.

Side bar hypothesis: Perhaps democracy works merely by chance in that it jerks the control back and forth never allowing a stationary position. (?)

Consider the farmer with a combine or 4 wheel drive tractor at $250K..$350K per unit.

And the crops need to come off this week or we loose $2.5M but the company says ship it to Kansas city for repair so we can upload the new software...

My explanation is that they abandoned the "buckets" that people put countries into when they talk about governance.

It's not communism. It's also not democracy.

They picked dictatorial government and matched it with unbridled capitalism which distills to two rules IMHO:

1. Make as much money as you want. 2. NEVER speak bad about the government/system.

It's working so far.

Their next big challenge is in the making now; de-population due to the one child policy of the past.

They will require massive immigration which will be de-stabilizing. Interesting times indeed ...

"you shouldn't be able to add code on the fly".

Unless you call them plug-ins. :)

Not so much now perhaps but a digital Yuan exists. Where that is headed is not clear but it has the possibility of disrupting the current order.

Forth's answer to your need is: Write your own higher level utilities in Forth. :)

I find it better to think of Forth as a clever Macro Assembly language for a two stack VM.

When used as designed, one does not actually program in Forth. You first write a tiny "language" and program the App in that.

Not a popular choice today.