Stuff about computing...mostly
It s now two years since I began my Riscyforth project of writing a Forth for RISC-V single board computers. But it wasn t until yesterday that I wrote my first serious/useful (if you like this sort of thing) program for it, a version of Conway s Game of Life. (This program wasn t as long as the unit [ ]
I ve made some improvements to the program and so here s an animation of the output.
Forty-one years after I wrote my first version of this (in Z80 machine code for the ZX80/ZX81) here s the latest, in Forth (Riscyforth for a RISC-V SBC). This is hot off the editor, so can no doubt be optimised, but I am pretty pleased with it.
The old joke is that Forth is a write-only language . in other words, you can write this stuff but you cannot understand it (and hence maintain it). Of course, any endorsement of this view is regarded as a heresy amongst many in the Forth community, but I have to admit that sometimes the Forth-bashers have [ ]
Today is, for me, the last working day of the year and I was able to finish with a small triumph successfully solving several programming conundrums that have eaten into my time over a number of weeks. The technology involved Python is not one I have had much experience with, and only [ ]
Earlier this week I noticed that some anti-vax propagandists have a new line of attack they aren t denying that vaccination protects you against severe illness from Covid, but they are saying that it is false to claim that vaccination limits the spread of the disease and hence its also wrong to insist that people [ ]
There is a new release (0.7) of Riscyforth my Forth for RISC-V based single board computers available Riscyforth 0.7. This release adds significant support for 64-bit IEEE754 floating point numbers to broadly match the 2012 Forth standard. The implementation of the Forth floating point word set isn t yet quite complete and Riscyforth does [ ]
Eugene Wigner s wrote a famous short essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences in 1960. To be honest I find it slightly underwhelming: to me mathematics is the abstraction from physical reality and not as might be implied by Wigner that our physical universe is a concretised subset of a [ ]
What is floating point ? How do you represent a number like in a compressed and useful way in binary? Any computer science student will be able to tell you that you use a floating point representation and, like me a couple of months ago, could probably move on to a hand-wavy explanation that you stored [ ]
A lot of the everyday calculations we rely on depend on floating point arithmetic in other words an approximation of accurrate mathematics and not actual accurate mathematics. For the last six weeks or so I have been working on bring floating point arithmetic to Riscyforth my assembly-based implementation of Forth for Risc-V single [ ]