Strathclyde Uni goes big on FIGnition!

[Julian Skidmore]

Hi folks,

Today I'll be shipping 160 FIGnition kits to Strathclyde Uni. They had a pilot workshop last year with 60 kits and since:

"One of the bits of feedback we got last year is that all the students would have liked the opportunity to build one" Dr Graeme West.

They decided to order 160 :-)

Amazing!

-cheers from julz

--
                             
                  The DIY 8-bit computer from nichemachines™

[Carl Attrill]

Well done Julz, build it, use it understand it, order more.

[Stuart Taylor]

i built it (the easy part for me), but i really struggle with forth.

Stuart.

[Carl Attrill]

Well done Stuart, what is the first thing you would like to programme?

 I am not an expert but I was saying the same thing as you when I first built mine. I would be more than happy to help!

I started by downloading a Jupiter ace manual and 'the forth bridge' PDFs and then bombarding people here with plenty of questions! http://www.jupiter-ace.co.uk/usermanual.html#ace_manuals

Carl.

[Julian Skidmore]

Hi Stuart,

Well done for building a FIGnition :-) !

On the google group you can find discussions about why I chose Forth, that is, the trade-offs I thought I should make.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't say that Forth is the easiest language to learn, mostly owing to the back-to-front nature of the language and handling stacks; though I think for simple programming involving input / output, variables, simple arithmetic, loops and procedure calls; it's not too arduous I believe. Have you followed the tutorials on the FIGnition web-site? I aim to improve the version of Forth we have on FIGnition - 0.9.7 for example has a much nicer editor, which works for command-line entry. However, I plan to improve it further as and when I have time.

-cheers from julz

[Julian Skidmore]

Way to go Carl!

-cheers from julz

[David]

Don't forget Starting Forth by Leo Brodie. It's an excellent intro to Forth.
I'd never seen Forth before and it got me up and running in no time.

[Stuart Taylor]

Ah, thanks for the links! These may help a lot.

is the figgy totally Jupiter compatible? my understanding is that there were/are variants of fourth?

Stuart.

[Stuart Taylor]

Perhaps i should have mentioned, that i'm comfortable with C, Perl and Java, and to me they all have a similar smell, so that may explain my inability to grok forth.

Stuart.

[Carl Attrill]

There are some differences, but there is enough to get an understanding  I discovered that emit commands are the same, however the screen it 24 x 25 so some listings have to be modified. 

I never did anything with BASIC what I like about forth is the routines you write can be called up as and when you want them, unlike BASIC where you have to create the path of events and close your computer off to one programme. 

[Richard Hesketh]

You could also try Leo's website...

http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/

- Richard

On 31 October 2012 10:44, Stuart Taylor <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

[Carl Attrill]

On Wednesday, 31 October 2012 10:49:01 UTC, Stu Taylor wrote:

Perhaps i should have mentioned, that i'm comfortable with C, Perl and Java, and to me they all have a similar smell, so that may explain my inability to grok forth.

 

Erm, gulp! 

 

you can @

= if I can then

[James Grimwood]

On 31 October 2012 10:48, Stuart Taylor <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

Perhaps i should have mentioned, that i'm comfortable with C, Perl and Java, and to me they all have a similar smell, so that may explain my inability to grok forth.

Yeah I get that too. Some of the code examples I see on here look like someone sneezed while typing.

I think later on I'll warm my soldering iron up and build the Fignition I bought at Play Expo, then see if I can work out the PS/2 keyboard thing.

--
iOS Games - http://ncot.piku.org.uk | Programming Blog - http://error-success.piku.org.uk | Photos - http://photography.piku.org.uk

[Stuart Taylor]

Thanks for the link, but now my head asplode:

"Forth is many things:

• a high-level language
• an assembly language
• an operating system
• a set of development tools
• a software design philosophy"

i think i may need to re-learn a lot of things.

Stuart

[Richard Hesketh]

Start with a high-level UI example such as "hello world" and work down the software stack 8-)

- Richard

[Julian Skidmore]

Hi Stuart,

Yes, Forth is quite an amazing language really, in the same class as lisp; a bit like a functional language, but with the operands before operations; though the operands are also operations :-)

A good way to think of it (from a modern view) is to consider how most of the time with OO languages we're executing lines of the form:

objectb=objecta.messageX(param1,param2,param3..); // where params are also potentially objects.
objectd=objectc.messageY(...);

And then after a few of these we get, e.g.:

objectl=objectb.messageM(objectd, objectc, paramz, paramq...);

Modern object oriented code becomes largely a set of messages sent to objects with additional parameters. It's all very regular; and effectively you create a stack of objects from your results, here objectb, objectd ... objectl and pass them as parameters with another message passed to an object. We do pretty much everything like that now, including loops (with iterators) etc. With languages like objective C we can even return messages back from methods (as selectors) and thus treat them as parameters to other objects (i.e. sending a returned message (i.e selector) to an object along with other parameters).

Forth is somewhat like that already, except the parameters come first, so if we were to OOify FIGnition Forth we'd get:

param1 param2 param3 messageX objecta ( returning objectb implicitly on the stack)

etc. Except that FIGnition Forth doesn't support objects, it's simply imperative commands:

param1 param2 param3 commandX

-cheers from julz

[Stuart Taylor]

Many thanks for your words of encouragement, and while i wait for my tests to run (real job), i'm practising some "hello world" using http://forthfreak.net/jsforth80x25.html following the jupiter guide, (i don't have the fig with me).

So far so good, its starting to make sense; sure there are some differences between the WORDS in the manual and the online jobby, but not enough to make it hard.

Stuart

[Steve(spt)]

Hi Stuart , everybody,

 

I’m sorry I’ve not been about much, much better now after the treatment.

 

In the Ace archive there is a forth book list with links to pdf version.

 

http://www.jupiter-ace.co.uk/index_forth_books.html

 

It the archive intention to PDF these out of print books overtime using LATEX, some have been completed just waiting for the permissions.

 

A warning ..

 

There is a book on Amazon ‘FORTH(programming Language)’ ISBN 9785510599022 £9.99 – Please DO NOT waste your money on it. The content is taken form the Wikki.

 

 

Kind regards,

Steve

 

IRC - EFNET join #jupiterace - IRC chat room

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http://www.youtube.com/user/JupiterAceArchive  - Jupiter Ace YouTube channel

Stuart.

 

Stuart.

 

                  The DIY 8-bit computer from nichemachines™

[carl]

Also I have found this manual to the FIG Forth for the ZX Spectrum, it gives some handy pointers ( if not most of the commands ) 

ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/games-info/f/Forth.txt

[West]

Hello,

We're pretty much set to run this activity with our students - a few usbasp drivers to install before Monday but all the rest is good to go, so by the end of next week there should be about 150 new fignitions out in the wild!

Graeme

[Julian Skidmore]

Hi Graeme,

That's so exciting, I'd love to see any of the photos and all the feedback!

Here's my brief build instructions for RevE as a pdf. I keep thinking, this must be the world's biggest DIY computer build :-D If only the Guinness Book of Records was in the area ;-)

-cheers from julz
ps. Word and Pages versions to come.

[Julian Skidmore]

Hi Graeme,

Here's the .doc version.

-cheers from julz

[Julian Skidmore]

Hi Graeme,

Here's the zipped pages version.

-cheers from julz