• =?UTF-8?B?wqMzLjYw?=

    From Andy Burns@3:770/3 to All on Thu Jan 21 15:49:58 2021
    New Pico Pi for £3.60

    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>

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  • From Nikolaj Lazic@3:770/3 to All on Thu Jan 21 17:25:02 2021
    Dana Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:49:58 +0000, Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> napis'o:
    New Pico Pi for £3.60

    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>

    But... it should not be called pi.
    People will whink it is like zero... but smaller.
    They should've named it something different.

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  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to Andy Burns on Thu Jan 21 17:21:35 2021
    Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
    New Pico Pi for £3.60

    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>

    Hmm, not a real Pi in any sort of way at all, it's a microcontroller
    with no OS. It's only a Pi because it's made by the same company.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Nikolaj Lazic on Thu Jan 21 19:39:25 2021
    On Thu, 21 Jan 2021 17:25:02 +0000, Nikolaj Lazic wrote:

    Dana Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:49:58 +0000, Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> napis'o:
    New Pico Pi for £3.60

    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>

    But... it should not be called pi.
    People will whink it is like zero... but smaller.
    They should've named it something different.

    Agreed.

    However, I've still bought one to experiment with because, unlike PICAXE
    chips, I can program it in C, its already mounted on a small PCB and it
    is slightly cheaper than the equivalent PICAXE I need for my project.

    Like the PICAXE, it can also do the things I need without any extra
    circuitry, such as detecting whether a switch is on or off, direct
    control of servos and of speed controllers for brushless electric motors
    (via its PWM outputs).



    --
    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Thu Jan 21 20:39:43 2021
    On 21/01/2021 17:21, Chris Green wrote:
    Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
    New Pico Pi for £3.60

    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>

    Hmm, not a real Pi in any sort of way at all, it's a microcontroller
    with no OS. It's only a Pi because it's made by the same company.


    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit processor

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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to Nikolaj Lazic on Thu Jan 21 20:40:33 2021
    On 21/01/2021 17:25, Nikolaj Lazic wrote:
    Dana Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:49:58 +0000, Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk>
    napis'o:
    New Pico Pi for £3.60

    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>

    But... it should not be called pi.
    People will whink it is like zero... but smaller.
    They should've named it something different.


    Raspberry Pasty?

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  • From Eli the Bearded@3:770/3 to cl@isbd.net on Thu Jan 21 21:03:26 2021
    In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
    Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
    New Pico Pi for £3.60
    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>
    Hmm, not a real Pi in any sort of way at all, it's a microcontroller
    with no OS. It's only a Pi because it's made by the same company.

    Looks like it aims to be an Arduino competitor, so yeah, it's a
    computer, but not in the same "runs a desktop" sense as the others in
    the "Pi" lineage.

    Elijah
    ------
    it even looks like an Arduino

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Martin Gregorie on Thu Jan 21 20:50:38 2021
    On Thu, 21 Jan 2021 19:39:25 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:

    is slightly cheaper than the equivalent PICAXE I need for my project.

    ... should have read 'only around twice the price of the PICAXE M14'

    From a first look at the docs, its somewhat better documented, too.


    --
    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From A. Dumas@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Thu Jan 21 21:51:20 2021
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit processor

    Name one.

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  • From Jim Jackson@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Thu Jan 21 22:04:41 2021
    On 2021-01-21, gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 21/01/2021 17:21, Chris Green wrote:
    Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
    New Pico Pi for ??3.60

    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>

    Hmm, not a real Pi in any sort of way at all, it's a microcontroller
    with no OS. It's only a Pi because it's made by the same company.


    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit processor

    :-)

    (assuming you meant it as a joke)

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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to A. Dumas on Thu Jan 21 22:54:01 2021
    On 21/01/2021 21:51, A. Dumas wrote:
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit processor

    Name one.


    As the Pi4 is a 64 bit processor, one assumed that all future
    developments by that company would be 64 bit.

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 01:01:51 2021
    On Thu, 21 Jan 2021 22:54:01 +0000, gareth evans wrote:

    On 21/01/2021 21:51, A. Dumas wrote:
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit
    processor

    Name one.


    As the Pi4 is a 64 bit processor, one assumed that all future
    developments by that company would be 64 bit.

    Why? I see no reason for such an IOT device to need more than 32 bits at
    the outside: it has no embedded OS, is not multi-tasking and doesn't need
    to be, so the only good reason to have more than 16 bits of address space
    is to accommodate the size of modern support libraries - after all its
    designed to allow current C and C++ libraries to be used, and lacking any
    i/o devices faster than USB, its unlikely to be processing large data
    volumes.

    I'd say that reducing its power consumption is more important: its
    quiescent state uses around 10 mW - a bit more than some battery driven applications where quiescent periods are much longer than bursts of
    activity might be comfortable with.

    It looks interesting to play with anyway, and I'll certainly be
    interested to see how using its FSMs can be used and how they affect code
    size.



    --
    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From A. Dumas@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 06:51:03 2021
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 21/01/2021 21:51, A. Dumas wrote:
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit processor >>
    Name one.

    As the Pi4 is a 64 bit processor, one assumed that all future
    developments by that company would be 64 bit.

    That's a general purpose CPU for use in general purpose computers (like the
    Pi 4). This new thing is a microcontroller chip for use in
    microcontrollers. There are currently no 64-bit microcontrollers on the
    market. I can imagine it one day moving that way, maybe for portable image recognition stuff? For now, it would be a very, very specialised niche and that's not Raspberry Pi's aim.

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  • From Joe@3:770/3 to A. Dumas on Fri Jan 22 09:33:10 2021
    On 22 Jan 2021 06:51:03 GMT
    A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:

    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 21/01/2021 21:51, A. Dumas wrote:
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit
    processor

    Name one.

    As the Pi4 is a 64 bit processor, one assumed that all future
    developments by that company would be 64 bit.

    That's a general purpose CPU for use in general purpose computers
    (like the Pi 4). This new thing is a microcontroller chip for use in microcontrollers. There are currently no 64-bit microcontrollers on
    the market. I can imagine it one day moving that way, maybe for
    portable image recognition stuff? For now, it would be a very, very specialised niche and that's not Raspberry Pi's aim.

    Indeed. I've yet to find a need for more than eight bits in a
    microcontroller, along with a maximum of 2KB of RAM. If I need more
    power, it's a RPi.

    --
    Joe

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  • From Theo@3:770/3 to Eli the Bearded on Fri Jan 22 10:38:52 2021
    Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
    Looks like it aims to be an Arduino competitor, so yeah, it's a
    computer, but not in the same "runs a desktop" sense as the others in
    the "Pi" lineage.

    I don't really get the market positioning of this. 'Arduino' is these days
    a programming interface, which runs on a variety of platforms from the
    original 8-bit ATMega to the x86 Intel Quark and MIPS chips running Linux. Users have been gradually moving from ATMega to ARM-based microcontrollers
    like the STM32 on boards like the Blue Pill.

    The Blue Pill doesn't have first party Arduino support, but the part is
    widely available for cheap. The RP2040 has slightly better specs, but
    there's a whole range of STM32s to choose from if you're willing to pay slightly more. The STM32 is also widely available for production from the usual distributors, while it remains to be seen whether you can buy the
    RP2040 in production volumes from distributors, or whether you have to do something 'special' (ie painful and awkward for a manufacturer).

    Also the 'teaching' market for microcontrollers is a bit crowded, with all
    the Arduinos, the BBC Micro:bit, as well as all the vendor platforms.

    I can see the wish to own the ecosystem, as they do by being single-supplier
    of the Pi SoC. Maybe the software ecosystem will develop around this like
    it has around Arduino, such that it's a no-brainer to use in a project
    because of the high quality libraries and documentation available. But hardware-wise there's nothing particularly earthshattering here.

    Theo

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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to Joe on Fri Jan 22 13:22:21 2021
    On 22/01/2021 09:33, Joe wrote:
    On 22 Jan 2021 06:51:03 GMT
    A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:

    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 21/01/2021 21:51, A. Dumas wrote:
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit
    processor

    Name one.

    As the Pi4 is a 64 bit processor, one assumed that all future
    developments by that company would be 64 bit.

    That's a general purpose CPU for use in general purpose computers
    (like the Pi 4). This new thing is a microcontroller chip for use in
    microcontrollers. There are currently no 64-bit microcontrollers on
    the market. I can imagine it one day moving that way, maybe for
    portable image recognition stuff? For now, it would be a very, very
    specialised niche and that's not Raspberry Pi's aim.

    Indeed. I've yet to find a need for more than eight bits in a microcontroller, along with a maximum of 2KB of RAM. If I need more
    power, it's a RPi.


    It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
    PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
    was up to me.

    Over the years I have been involved in real-time OS
    development and language interpreters to the extent
    that in my retirement I've an N-I-H stance towards
    others' software.

    I'd like to relive my youth but with the 64-bit instruction
    set of the ARM but without being imbrangled in all the
    bolt-on (Lancashire? :-) ) goodies that the RPi4 has.

    I don't have the capability to produce the PCB and
    solder down a BGA myself, despite a radio ham's
    junk box of nearly 60 years' standing.

    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From The Natural Philosopher@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 13:34:07 2021
    On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    FORTH was good stuff speed wise


    --
    Climate Change: Socialism wearing a lab coat.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to The Natural Philosopher on Fri Jan 22 15:03:35 2021
    On 22/01/2021 13:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    FORTH was good stuff speed wise



    I never used it in anger, but spent a lot of time thinking
    about it. I seem to have on my bookshelf most of the FORTH
    and TIL primers. I was considering something like a FORTH
    but not being based upon Reverse Polish.

    ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

    Now, that was a weird instruction set! ISTR 8-off 16 bit
    registers but no 16-bit moves, all having to be done in
    8-bit chunks through the accumulator, and no conventional
    subroutine call but change which of the 16-bit registers
    at any time was the program counter!

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From A. Dumas@3:770/3 to All on Fri Jan 22 16:13:01 2021
    Op 22-01-2021 om 11:38 schreef Theo:
    Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
    Looks like it aims to be an Arduino competitor, so yeah, it's a
    computer, but not in the same "runs a desktop" sense as the others in
    the "Pi" lineage.

    I don't really get the market positioning of this.

    1. CHEAP without sending your money to China.
    2. Really good performance with high clock, two cores (is this unique
    for M0 boards?) and two PIO banks (killer feature).
    3. Last but not least: fabulously extensive & comprehensive & high
    quality documentation.

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  • From A. Dumas@3:770/3 to All on Fri Jan 22 16:07:41 2021
    Op 22-01-2021 om 14:22 schreef gareth evans:
    It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
    PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
    was up to me.

    Over the years I have been involved in real-time OS
    development and language interpreters to the extent
    that in my retirement I've an N-I-H stance towards
    others' software.

    I'd like to relive my youth but with the 64-bit instruction
    set of the ARM but without being imbrangled in all the
    bolt-on (Lancashire?  :-)  ) goodies that the RPi4 has.

    I don't have the capability to produce the PCB and
    solder down a BGA myself, despite a radio ham's
    junk box of nearly 60 years' standing.

    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    A Teensy 4.x might be a good start. ARM Cortex M7 600 MHz, floating
    point hardware, lots of RAM and flash.
    https://www.pjrc.com/store/teensy41.html

    (It says 64-bit fp...! :) but I think that's "just" an accelerated
    simulation using 32-bit register pairs.)

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  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 15:00:00 2021
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 09:33, Joe wrote:
    On 22 Jan 2021 06:51:03 GMT
    A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:

    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 21/01/2021 21:51, A. Dumas wrote:
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    ... and it's a great disappointment to me that it's not a 64-bit
    processor

    Name one.

    As the Pi4 is a 64 bit processor, one assumed that all future
    developments by that company would be 64 bit.

    That's a general purpose CPU for use in general purpose computers
    (like the Pi 4). This new thing is a microcontroller chip for use in
    microcontrollers. There are currently no 64-bit microcontrollers on
    the market. I can imagine it one day moving that way, maybe for
    portable image recognition stuff? For now, it would be a very, very
    specialised niche and that's not Raspberry Pi's aim.

    Indeed. I've yet to find a need for more than eight bits in a microcontroller, along with a maximum of 2KB of RAM. If I need more
    power, it's a RPi.


    It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
    PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
    was up to me.

    Ah, but the normal process would be to enter the boot loader by hand,
    then a bigger/better loader from paper tape and then the actual OS.

    Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
    with the hardware?

    I started at a similar time (early 1970s) on a wierd device called the
    PDP-12 (an odd marriage of a PDP-8 and a university developed machine
    called a Linc-12).

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Fri Jan 22 15:18:06 2021
    On 22/01/2021 15:00, Chris Green wrote:


    It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
    PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
    was up to me.

    Ah, but the normal process would be to enter the boot loader by hand,
    then a bigger/better loader from paper tape and then the actual OS.

    Off the top of my head, having toggled it in so often (octal!)

    16701
    26
    1272
    352
    5211
    15711

    EOE after 50 years!

    Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
    with the hardware?

    First 10 years as a professional softy were PDP11 assembler
    on SCADA systems. Most challenging ISTR was a cassette tape driver
    to run under our own realtime exec.

    I started at a similar time (early 1970s) on a wierd device called the
    PDP-12 (an odd marriage of a PDP-8 and a university developed machine
    called a Linc-12).

    Yes, I'm aware of that. Wasn't there some difficulty in on-the-fly
    switching between the two instruction sets? I've the thing described
    in a DEC sales clossy from 1971.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Tauno Voipio@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 17:19:40 2021
    On 22.1.21 17.03, gareth evans wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    FORTH was good stuff speed wise



    I never used it in anger, but spent a lot of time thinking
    about it. I seem to have on my bookshelf most of the FORTH
    and TIL primers. I was considering something like a FORTH
    but not being based upon Reverse Polish.

    ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

    Now, that was a weird instruction set! ISTR 8-off 16 bit
    registers but no 16-bit moves, all having to be done in
    8-bit chunks through the accumulator, and no conventional
    subroutine call but change which of the 16-bit registers
    at any time was the program counter!


    FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older
    HP calculators.

    --

    -TV

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 15:34:36 2021
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
    [snip]

    ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

    Now, that was a weird instruction set! ISTR 8-off 16 bit
    registers but no 16-bit moves, all having to be done in
    8-bit chunks through the accumulator, and no conventional
    subroutine call but change which of the 16-bit registers
    at any time was the program counter!

    I worked on 1802 based systems from 1980 to 1987 in Oman. It was all
    done in assembler, I actually wrote an 1802 macro assember using the
    very basic assembler that came with the RCA 1802 developement systems.

    As you say it was a very odd instruction set. You could use any one
    of the 16 bit registers as the program counter which could lead to
    some very confusing (and difficult to debug) code.

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

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  • From Stephen Pelc@3:770/3 to headstone255@yahoo.com on Fri Jan 22 15:53:33 2021
    On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 13:22:21 +0000, gareth evans
    <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:

    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    MPE's VFX Forth family is a Forth compiler that generates
    optimised native code. It is available for most operating
    systems and deep embedded use. ARM64 support is coming.

    Stephen


    --
    Stephen Pelc, stephen@vfxforth.com <<< NEW
    MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
    133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
    tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, +44 (0)78 0390 3612
    web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

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  • From Chris Green@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 16:02:45 2021
    gareth evans <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:

    First 10 years as a professional softy were PDP11 assembler
    on SCADA systems. Most challenging ISTR was a cassette tape driver
    to run under our own realtime exec.

    I was working on SCADA in Oman from 1980 to 1987, the PDP-12 wasn't
    SCADA though, it was a in a hospital.


    I started at a similar time (early 1970s) on a wierd device called the PDP-12 (an odd marriage of a PDP-8 and a university developed machine called a Linc-12).

    Yes, I'm aware of that. Wasn't there some difficulty in on-the-fly
    switching between the two instruction sets? I've the thing described
    in a DEC sales clossy from 1971.

    Well it wasn't 'difficult' it was just rather odd because the whole
    addressing structure changed, the PDP-8 had 12-bit addresses (i.e.
    memory banks were 4k) whereas the Linc machine had 10-bit addresses
    (i.e. 1k memory banks). It was just a single instruction to change
    from one mode to the other but the ramifications in addressing etc.
    could be quite interesting! :-)

    It's all a very long time ago now!

    --
    Chris Green
    ·

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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to Tauno Voipio on Fri Jan 22 15:24:47 2021
    On 22/01/2021 15:19, Tauno Voipio wrote:
    On 22.1.21 17.03, gareth evans wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    FORTH was good stuff speed wise



    I never used it in anger, but spent a lot of time thinking
    about it. I seem to have on my bookshelf most of the FORTH
    and TIL primers. I was considering something like a FORTH
    but not being based upon Reverse Polish.

    ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

    Now, that was a weird instruction set! ISTR 8-off 16 bit
    registers but no 16-bit moves, all having to be done in
    8-bit chunks through the accumulator, and no conventional
    subroutine call but change which of the 16-bit registers
    at any time was the program counter!


    FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older
    HP calculators.


    You misunderstood my comment.

    Let me rephrase ... I was considering a language without using
    reverse polish along the lines of FORTH's interactiveness.

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  • From =?UTF-8?Q?Bj=c3=b6rn_Lundin?=@3:770/3 to All on Fri Jan 22 17:17:02 2021
    Den 2021-01-22 kl. 16:03, skrev gareth evans:


    ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

    I was at a fascinating talk in Madrid in 2015 by a guy at ESA
    and he said (I can't remember which - or both) that either Rosetta or
    Philae was coded i Forth, with design/coding started in 1994 and
    launched 10 years later.


    --
    Björn

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  • From gareth evans@3:770/3 to Stephen Pelc on Fri Jan 22 16:17:51 2021
    On 22/01/2021 15:53, Stephen Pelc wrote:
    On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 13:22:21 +0000, gareth evans
    <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:

    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language
    development, essentially interactive as was BASIC
    and FORTH but running at the speed of compiled
    code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    MPE's VFX Forth family is a Forth compiler that generates
    optimised native code. It is available for most operating
    systems and deep embedded use. ARM64 support is coming.

    ... and can you take the compiled executing code and continue
    to develop it interactively? (For which I do not mean
    returning to a source file, editing it and then recompiling)

    My thinking is that for any interactive program, there has to be
    some form of tokenisation to represent the source program, so
    why should not those tokens be the carefully-chosen unambiguous
    machine code instructions that execute the code?

    I am sure that this is not an original idea and that it has been
    done many times over the years what with everyman and his
    aunts, uncles and family pets all having a go at computer programming,
    but it is an idea with which I dabbled back in 1986 and that now I
    have the spare brain capacity to continue with!

    ie, considerable exhaustion resulted then with intensive programming
    in the daily round of my job and then attempting even more programming
    in the evenings.

    1986? Half a lifetime ago, I being 70 next month! :-)

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to gareth evans on Fri Jan 22 16:25:37 2021
    On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 15:24:47 +0000, gareth evans wrote:

    On 22/01/2021 15:19, Tauno Voipio wrote:
    On 22.1.21 17.03, gareth evans wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
    On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
    In my retirement, I have some ideas on language development,
    essentially interactive as was BASIC and FORTH but running at the
    speed of compiled code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
    like a good starter.

    FORTH was good stuff speed wise



    I never used it in anger, but spent a lot of time thinking about it. I
    seem to have on my bookshelf most of the FORTH and TIL primers. I was
    considering something like a FORTH but not being based upon Reverse
    Polish.

    ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

    Now, that was a weird instruction set! ISTR 8-off 16 bit registers but
    no 16-bit moves, all having to be done in 8-bit chunks through the
    accumulator, and no conventional subroutine call but change which of
    the 16-bit registers at any time was the program counter!


    FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older HP
    calculators.


    You misunderstood my comment.

    Let me rephrase ... I was considering a language without using reverse
    polish along the lines of FORTH's interactiveness.

    Have you looked at John von Neumanns's interactive JOSS language or its derivatives JEAN (found on ICL 1900s) and FOCAL (on DEC boxes).

    It used real line numbers (so if the needed a line between lines 1.1 and
    1.2 you just gave it 1.15 as its line number) and DO PART 3 ran all lines
    with with 3 as the integral part of the line number.

    It was easy to write and debug but conditionals couldn't have an ELSE
    branch because the condition was the last part of the statement:

    2.55 A = B * C + D IF q = "yes"

    Speed wasn't bad because I think that, like many basics, the 'run'
    command may gave compiled (or at least tokenised) the program before
    running it, though I don't remember much gap between startind a run and
    getting results. I certainly preferred JEAN to BASIC.



    --
    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to All on Fri Jan 22 16:30:32 2021
    On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:17:02 +0100, Björn Lundin wrote:

    Den 2021-01-22 kl. 16:03, skrev gareth evans:


    ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?

    I was at a fascinating talk in Madrid in 2015 by a guy at ESA and he
    said (I can't remember which - or both) that either Rosetta or Philae
    was coded i Forth, with design/coding started in 1994 and launched 10
    years later.

    I don't see why not - IIRC FORTH originally came from the astronomy
    community, who used it to control telescopes.





    --
    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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  • From Stephen Pelc@3:770/3 to b.f.lundin@gmail.com on Fri Jan 22 17:47:40 2021
    On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:17:02 +0100, =?UTF-8?Q?Bj=c3=b6rn_Lundin?= <b.f.lundin@gmail.com> wrote:

    I was at a fascinating talk in Madrid in 2015 by a guy at ESA
    and he said (I can't remember which - or both) that either Rosetta or
    Philae was coded i Forth, with design/coding started in 1994 and
    launched 10 years later.

    Philae used 10 RTX2010 CPUs, an ADSP21020 and two 80C3X devices.

    Forth on an RTX2010 was far and away the best choice for performance
    and ease of test - the CPU was designed for Forth. An RTX2010 is
    a rad-hard 16 bit dual stack machine made by Harris/Intersil. It
    clocked at 8 MHz (probably rather less for flight use) and could
    address 1 Mb of memory.

    These days rad-hard development focuses on processors in FPGAs.

    Stephen

    --
    Stephen Pelc, stephen@vfxforth.com <<< NEW
    MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
    133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
    tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, +44 (0)78 0390 3612
    web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

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  • From Stephen Pelc@3:770/3 to headstone255@yahoo.com on Fri Jan 22 17:25:26 2021
    On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 16:17:51 +0000, gareth evans
    <headstone255@yahoo.com> wrote:

    My thinking is that for any interactive program, there has to be
    some form of tokenisation to represent the source program, so
    why should not those tokens be the carefully-chosen unambiguous
    machine code instructions that execute the code?

    The compiled form includes the names and the compiled code.
    That's all.

    Yes, you can keep on developing interactively. The tokens you
    need are probably the source code. The compiler is very, very fast,
    on most PC machines over 1 million lines of code per minute.

    Stephen


    --
    Stephen Pelc, stephen@vfxforth.com <<< NEW
    MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time
    133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England
    tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, +44 (0)78 0390 3612
    web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads

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  • From Joe@3:770/3 to Chris Green on Fri Jan 22 20:05:01 2021
    On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 15:00:00 +0000
    Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:


    It is 50 years ago this year that I cut my teeth on a naked
    PDP11/20 with no OS and only an assembler. Everything I did
    was up to me.

    Ah, but the normal process would be to enter the boot loader by hand,
    then a bigger/better loader from paper tape and then the actual OS.

    Around 1980 I was working on a TV character generator based on the DG
    Nova, another mini of that era. It had a rackmount main frame with a
    front panel with octal pushbuttons, rather than the imposing row of
    switches. About half a dozen manually entered codes, than it fired up
    the paper tape reader.

    Or did you actually write naked assembler code to do things direct
    with the hardware?

    I wrote a disassembler in machine code, then did some analysis of some
    of the supplied programs.

    There was an optional one or two hard drives, 1.25MB in those big IBM cartridges.

    The (TTL-based) Nova actually went out of production while I was with
    the character generator company, so they made their own using AMD
    bit-slice microprocessors, AMD2901, if I recall correctly. I believe DG
    also did this for a later Nova model.

    --
    Joe

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  • From Eli the Bearded@3:770/3 to A. Dumas on Fri Jan 22 20:04:39 2021
    In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:
    1. CHEAP without sending your money to China.

    Where is it made? I could not find that. I see "designed in UK", but
    that sould like Apple's "designed in California".

    2. Really good performance with high clock, two cores (is this unique
    for M0 boards?) and two PIO banks (killer feature).

    I don't know enough to comment here.

    3. Last but not least: fabulously extensive & comprehensive & high
    quality documentation.

    The documentation I've seen does look first rate. Still, competing
    against Arduino with the wealth of existing code and experience will be an uphill fight.

    Elijah
    ------
    only started using Arduino in the last six months

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  • From A. Dumas@3:770/3 to All on Fri Jan 22 23:39:42 2021
    Op 22-01-2021 om 21:04 schreef Eli the Bearded:
    In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:
    1. CHEAP without sending your money to China.

    Where is it made? I could not find that. I see "designed in UK", but
    that sould like Apple's "designed in California".

    Sony Inazawa, Japan https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/#comment-1549758

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  • From Scott Alfter@3:770/3 to joe@jretrading.com on Fri Jan 22 22:14:09 2021
    In article <20210122093310.2a6e8bc8@jresid.jretrading.com>,
    Joe <joe@jretrading.com> wrote:
    Indeed. I've yet to find a need for more than eight bits in a >microcontroller, along with a maximum of 2KB of RAM. If I need more
    power, it's a RPi.

    3D printers can definitely benefit from 32-bit microcontrollers, especially
    if you're going beyond the usual Cartesian or CoreXY kinematics.

    _/_
    / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
    (IIGS( https://alfter.us/ Top-posting!
    \_^_/ >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?

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  • From Computer Nerd Kev@3:770/3 to Eli the Bearded on Fri Jan 22 23:18:54 2021
    Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
    In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:

    3. Last but not least: fabulously extensive & comprehensive & high
    quality documentation.

    The documentation I've seen does look first rate.

    Well that's nice, I wish they could have done that with their other
    boards. Rather than all the omissions in the schematics, lack of
    electrical specifications (except for the Compute Modules), and rare
    official Broadcom documents that hardly look proof read.

    For the Pi Zero you always seem to have to fall back on hearsay
    and/or a snippet of code from part of the Linux kernel if you can
    find it.

    I get that this thing has some extra peripheral functions, but I'd
    say a lot of the applications this is aimed at could be achieved
    with an official and well documented bare-metal programming
    environment for the Pi Zero. Mind you, maybe the weird business
    model around the Pi Zero means they don't really want to encourage
    that.

    --
    __ __
    #_ < |\| |< _#

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  • From ray carter@3:770/3 to Eli the Bearded on Sat Jan 23 01:53:50 2021
    On Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:03:26 +0000, Eli the Bearded wrote:

    In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
    Andy Burns <usenet@andyburns.uk> wrote:
    New Pico Pi for £3.60
    <https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-pico>
    Hmm, not a real Pi in any sort of way at all, it's a microcontroller
    with no OS. It's only a Pi because it's made by the same company.

    Looks like it aims to be an Arduino competitor, so yeah, it's a
    computer, but not in the same "runs a desktop" sense as the others in
    the "Pi" lineage.

    Elijah ------
    it even looks like an Arduino

    As I understand, it is not yet set up to use the Arduino IDE but should
    work fine with an install of micro-python. The Arduino family generally
    have MUCH less memory to work with.

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  • From Eli the Bearded@3:770/3 to A. Dumas on Sat Jan 23 00:23:23 2021
    In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, A. Dumas <alexandre@dumas.fr.invalid> wrote:
    Op 22-01-2021 om 21:04 schreef Eli the Bearded:
    Where is it made? I could not find that.
    Sony Inazawa, Japan https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-silicon-pico-now-on-sale/#comment-1549758

    Thanks.

    Elijah
    ------
    obviously did not read the comments on the blog

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  • From Charlie Gibbs@3:770/3 to Tauno Voipio on Sat Jan 23 19:56:12 2021
    On 2021-01-22, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voipio@notused.fi.invalid> wrote:

    FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older
    HP calculators.

    Forth love if honk then

    --
    /~\ Charlie Gibbs | "Some of you may die,
    \ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | but it's a sacrifice
    X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | I'm willing to make."
    / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lord Farquaad (Shrek)

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  • From Ahem A Rivet's Shot@3:770/3 to Charlie Gibbs on Sat Jan 23 20:25:54 2021
    On 23 Jan 2021 19:56:12 GMT
    Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> wrote:

    On 2021-01-22, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voipio@notused.fi.invalid> wrote:

    FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older
    HP calculators.

    Forth love if honk then

    Yoda strong in the Forth is.

    --
    Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
    The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
    You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/

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  • From Martin Gregorie@3:770/3 to Charlie Gibbs on Sat Jan 23 20:31:00 2021
    On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 19:56:12 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

    On 2021-01-22, Tauno Voipio <tauno.voipio@notused.fi.invalid> wrote:

    FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older HP
    calculators.

    Forth love if honk then

    I had a play with it years ago on a 6908 micro under FLEX09. It was
    interesting and ran well, though I didn't really like its filing system
    much: an array of 1K pages identified and referenced by page number.

    What intrigued me most about it was the remarkably small amount of the
    system that was 6809 binary - from memory all a FLEX directory listing
    showed on the Forth floppy disk was the Forth loader and a very large
    file that contained the Forth filing system. The loader was a normal FLEX program that read page zero from the FORTH filing system and then passed control to the first Forth word in page zero. This and the next 20-30
    words were binary and did very low level stuff. Everything else was
    written in Forth, so effectively the Forth runtime built itself from
    source whenever it was started, and did so remarkably quickly.

    I never did much more than that with Forth because the programs I wanted
    to write were much easier to write in PL/9 (PL/M ported to 6809 FLEX) or assembler and IIRC that Forth version as published could only talk to the terminal and read or write pages in the Forth filing system, which was
    limited to a single file.


    --
    --
    Martin | martin at
    Gregorie | gregorie dot org

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