Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 02:53:15 -0800 (PST) From: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> To: mike@smith.net.au Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BootFORTH - demo floppy Message-ID: <199812211053.CAA12289@newsguy.com>
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At Mon, 21 Dec 1998 02:37:36 -0800, you wrote >> >> Most string words in Forth take their count from the stack, so it's one cell, >> not byte. I suppose FICL uses 32 bits integers as cells, right? > >/* >** Strings in FICL are stored in Pascal style - with a count >** preceding the text. We'll also NULL-terminate them so that >** they work with the usual C lib string functions. (Belt & >** suspenders? You decide.) >** STRINGINFO hides the implementation with a couple of >** macros for use in internal routines. >*/ Just to make sure there are no misunderstandings here, this does not invalidate my point above. I don't know where these "strings" are used (most likely, the dictionary), but, for instance, EVALUATE takes it's count from the stack, not from the memory (in fact, it doesn't even expect a count in the memory), and it is thus cell-limited in size. >I *think* that Ficl will have to move to using 64-bit cells, at least >on the Alpha (since it stores pointers in them). ANS Forth is perfectly capable of handling different-sized cells and characters. In the code I sent, for instance, "80 allot" would rather have to be written "80 chars allot", if I were doing anything but a hasty hack. >This is definitely something to take up with John Sadler. The whole >reason that it's an issue from my perspective is that there are some >cases where I can see it being desirable to be able to handle strings >longer than 255 bytes with the bootloader, and that means that the >scripting language has to be able to deal with them. Sure. As I said, there isn't anything expect COUNT, C" and WORD that use memory-counted strings (in the interface, at least), and you can easily stay away from those. >Thanks for the clarification. As I said, I really would like this to "work". Feel free to send me any questions. (As I said in another mail, real work from my part will have to wait for a hd.) -- Daniel C. Sobral dcs@newsguy.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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