From owner-freebsd-current Fri Oct 30 12:08:43 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id MAA19906 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Fri, 30 Oct 1998 12:08:43 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from korin.warman.org.pl (korin.nask.waw.pl [148.81.160.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA19901 for ; Fri, 30 Oct 1998 12:08:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from abial@nask.pl) Received: from localhost (abial@localhost) by korin.warman.org.pl (8.9.1/8.8.5) with SMTP id VAA26233; Fri, 30 Oct 1998 21:13:35 +0100 (CET) X-Authentication-Warning: korin.warman.org.pl: abial owned process doing -bs Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 21:13:34 +0100 (CET) From: Andrzej Bialecki X-Sender: abial@korin.warman.org.pl To: Mike Smith cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" , current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: New boot loader and alternate kernels In-Reply-To: <199810301936.LAA01533@dingo.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 30 Oct 1998, Mike Smith wrote: > > On Fri, 30 Oct 1998, Mike Smith wrote: > > > > > > > > It needs to be portable. I haven't seen a decent portable Forth under > > > about 40k. Atlast isn't very decent. > > > > Atlast is NOT Forth, and it's implementation leaves much to desire... Tell > > you somethin: please go to www.taygeta.com, and see some pretty, tiny > > Forth implementations in versions for 3-4 architectures. There are such. > > Been there, done that. The portable ones are all too big. 8) They are big because either they use termcap, or curses, or they define complete CORE, CORE-EXT, DOUBLE, FLOATING, LOCALS, and whatnot... We wouldn't need most of it. Heck, there are Forth's for PICs! This can be done, and IMVHO advantages are obvious... > Actually, ~40k doesn't bother me much, once we get the alpha issues > sorted out. But Forth is more intimidating than it needs to be; > something with an sh-like syntax would be nicer. It depends. When you use Sparc's boot monitor you don't need to be aware what's behind a word "help" or "power-off". > (Yes, I agree that Forth would be more powerful. Compromises...) Ah, well. I guess I'm proposing Forth so strongly because it's so powerful and compact, and fast... and so incredibly extensible when you need it. No need to reinvent the same things each time, writing yet another incompatible language... I think this is important opportunity - let's not miss it without good reasons... As I said, there are people among us who can even write small enough Forth kernel for our purposes. Andrzej Bialecki -------------------- ++-------++ ------------------------------------- ||PicoBSD|| FreeBSD in your pocket? Go and see: Research & Academic |+-------+| "Small & Embedded FreeBSD" Network in Poland | |TT~~~| | http://www.freebsd.org/~picobsd/ -------------------- ~-+==---+-+ ------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message