[colorforth] Musings on SEAForth

["M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I cruised by the IntellAsys site last night. I signed up there some time 
last year, and my logon is still active, although the site is being 
revamped and is supposed to be alive some time this month. (Jeff, I 
suppose you can't confirm or deny that, can you?) The last time I was 
there, some tools were available but they appear to have been withdrawn. 
What I remember was that the tools ran in either SwiftForth on Windows 
or gForth on Linux, both of which I have.

What little is there is interesting. I think I understand how one would 
program these devices at the colorForth level now, but what's missing is 
two things:

1. Some insight into the design decisions. For example, why 18 bits? 
It's fine for CD-quality audio but not for DAT-quality, which requires 
24 bits. Sure, you can get fewer 24-bit cores on a chip than you can 
with 18-bit cores, but you can get *more* 16-bit cores, and many more 
people have instincts about 16-bit arithmetic than 18-bit arithmetic.

2. How one would fit a large complex program to an array of these 
devices. While Forth is certainly a multi-level language eminently 
suitable for designing domain-specific languages, I don't see how you 
could *automatically* go from a high-level problem description to 
working hardware and software, especially with the cores having a ROM 
component!

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