On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 3:13:55 PM UTC+2, none albert wrote:
> >So dxforth, I concur with you on this point.
> So do I, but it is possible to make life easier without compromising
> the simplicity of the kernel Forth.

True - in 4tH (with it's wildly different architecture) I see the same thing
happening. But due to the radical division between "compilation" and
"interpretation", I see it's not happening in the (inner) interpreter. It's
happening in the compiler - or even the tools on top of the compiler, like
the preprocessor.

The VM hasn't become much smarter at all. In 10 (!) years, that code has
seen only 15 changes - roughly a third of them C syntax related, a third of
them architecture related and the final third of them behavior related (incl.
new functionality).

The compiler has seen about fifty changes in the meanwhile - most them
behavior related.

Translated to the classical Forth architecture - primitives and inner interpreter
have hardly changed.

I dunno how that works out for other Forths - I think it would be an interesting
question, though.

Hans Bezemer

In article <8d0072a1-9127-41b4-9d88-89a001609358n@googlegroups.com>,
Hans Bezemer <the.beez.speaks@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Thursday, April 28, 2022 at 3:13:55 PM UTC+2, none albert wrote:
>> >So dxforth, I concur with you on this point.
>> So do I, but it is possible to make life easier without compromising
>> the simplicity of the kernel Forth.
>
>True - in 4tH (with it's wildly different architecture) I see the same thing
>happening. But due to the radical division between "compilation" and
>"interpretation", I see it's not happening in the (inner) interpreter. It's
>happening in the compiler - or even the tools on top of the compiler, like
>the preprocessor.
>
>The VM hasn't become much smarter at all. In 10 (!) years, that code has
>seen only 15 changes - roughly a third of them C syntax related, a third of
>them architecture related and the final third of them behavior related (incl.
>new functionality).
>
>The compiler has seen about fifty changes in the meanwhile - most them
>behavior related.
>
>Translated to the classical Forth architecture - primitives and inner
>interpreter
>have hardly changed.
>
>I dunno how that works out for other Forths - I think it would be an interesting
>question, though.

Don't stop looking for simplications. I recently managed the central (FIND)
word from 6 to 3 labels and eliminate a third of the underlying
~MATCH word.
The discotheque principle is useful. Nobody gets in, before somebody gets
out. If you add a word, an other word has to get removed.
This would be a useful principle for laws also.

>
>Hans Bezemer

Groetjes Albert
--
"in our communism country Viet Nam, people are forced to be
alive and in the western country like US, people are free to
die from Covid 19 lol" duc ha
albert@spe&ar&c.xs4all.nl &=n http://home.hccnet.nl/a.w.m.van.der.horst

On Friday, April 29, 2022 at 11:37:31 AM UTC+2, none albert wrote:
> Don't stop looking for simplications. I recently managed the central (FIND)
> word from 6 to 3 labels and eliminate a third of the underlying
> ~MATCH word.
I recently reprogrammed the inner Accept() word. I was hesitant to touch it
since - although murky - it had worked absolutely fine for three decades.

I must have grown a bit in that time, because I found out how it exactly worked.
And the code is not only much clearer now - it has additional functionality!

> The discotheque principle is useful. Nobody gets in, before somebody gets
> out. If you add a word, an other word has to get removed.
> This would be a useful principle for laws also.
I have this policy that 4tH has 106 reserved tokens. For every one added, one
must disappear. That leaves someone who wants to expand on it a clean
150 ones to play with. Every change in a token bumps up the minor version
number. That's why 3.63.x never came to be.

So yes, I agree on that policy. That's why the compiler itself feeds most of
the functionality changes. E.g. I recently added CASE..ENDCASE, but that's
all handled by the compiler. The (inner) interpreter gets fed the very same tokens
as before.

Hans Bezemer