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Re: [colorforth] Hello - and where to begin?

Gwenhwyfaer wrote:


The other idea I had for it is a new synth product, but then I tend to
see *everything* in terms of whether I could build a synth around it.
The short bit length and lack of multiplication are certainly
complications for DSP apps, but perhaps not fatal ones.
How many bits does a SeaFORTH cell have? For fixed-point DSP, all you really need is 24 bits and a way of efficiently generating a 48-bit sum. But a lack of multiplier would be a bit harder to work around. 


So is document search and indexing a la Google for the
same reason.


Since I'm sure you don't mean the absence of floating point hardware
here, which reason is that?
Yes, I do mean the lack of floating point. The core of most statistical text processing functions, including the indexing, is something called a singular value decomposition. That's a variant of a matrix eigenvalue/eigenvector solver that requires efficient double-precision floating point vector operations. 


I'm not altogether convinced that the argument for not trying
something different now is that trying something different didn't work
before. It seems to me that this mindset is what's led us to the
current, insufferably conservative, state of the computer market,
where there is basically one of everything, and anyone who suggests
that perhaps what has come about has not done so by merit is shouted
down almost immediately.

...Well, that and the ravages of unfettered capitalism:
Sure, different things get tried. Intel has built a number of "different" processors besides the x86, for example. Remember the i860? i960? ia64/Itanium? Intel built hypercube supercomputers. Intel built rectangular array supercomputers. Intel also builds sound and video processors and I think network interface controllers too. Intel still builds the 8051, I think. 



Hell, modern CPUs emulate their "native" instruction sets, which is a
trend that always struck me as bizarre...
Not as bizarre as a Ruby interpreter running on a Java Virtual Machine *faster* than the same code run by a Ruby interpreter written in C and compiled -O3. :) 

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