Friday 22 January 2010

Bumbling along like a ...

Well, A/C supposed to be fixed today. Finally a service tech was called and came yesterday, and a couple of minutes on the roof and he was ordering a new control unit. Dodgy caps not too uncommon apparently. But because of the increased demand they don't have any spares ... hopefully that's all it is, as it's just in the nick of time - weather starting to turn hot.

Kept bumbling along with my FORTH attempt. Would really help if I concentrated a bit better, but lack of sleep and so on. Not entirely switched on. Still, making some progress.

I decided to standardise some of the basic words, which meant a lot of breakage. But I more or less have that going, and implemented DOES>, which jonesforth didn't implement. These changes mean I wont be able to use much of the bootstrap for jonesforth either - but I guess that will just make it a better learning exercise, wont it.

I'm still sticking with assembly where possible, although considering just using c for call-outs to significant processing steps; that's basically how the assembly is written anyway. I'm finding reading the standard a bit tough going - understandably it's target audience is really people who have a lot of experience with FORTH implementations already.

It's a huge mess though, but perhaps now some of the basics are starting to work I can think about cleaning it up a bit. Then add a few bits and pieces and then start trying to use it. I want to add some hardware exception handling at least, so crashes aren't fatal. And I need to be able to input from memory to bootstrap the code. Well something to keep poking at I guess.

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