SVFIG
Next Meeting:
Saturday, October 28th
at
Cogswell College
1175 Bordeaux Dr.
Rooms 197A and 197B
Sunnyvale, CA

If you would like to have meeting announcements e-mailed to you, send the message Subscribe SVFIG Meeting Agenda to: George Perry

Wireless Internet access is anticipated (though not guaranteed) at Cogswell, so bring your wifi.

October Agenda

Morning Sessions

09:45 --- Coffee

10:00 --- riscForth, reduced instruction set Forth - CH Ting
"I am trying to minimize the number of eP32 instructions. My goal is to reduce the machine instructions to 16 so that they can be encoded in 4-bit nibbles. Here is the current instruction list: CALL, RET, IF, ELSE, NEXT, @, !, DUP, DROP, OVER, >R, R>, AND, XOR, +, 2/. There is no room for NOP, but it can be synthesized with DUP DROP. I think a reasonable computer can be built with only these 16 instructions."

"My experiments now show that I need 17 instructions. I will let people vote to have their favorite instructions included."

11:30 --- Counting Zipcodes - Dave Jaffe
Dave will describe his completed Forth program that processes text files containing zipcodes and country names.

Lunch

NOON - Lunch

Afternoon Sessions

13:00 --- Introductions, announcements, rumors, and random access

13:30 --- Forth Ramblings - Glen Haydon
An historical review.

14:30 --- Break

15:00 --- From Third Generation LEGO Mindstorms to ... Forth? - Glen Reuschling
Glen's presentation will begin with demonstrations of the three different incarnations of LEGO's robotics learning systems: LEGO-LOGO, LEGO Mindstorms, and LEGO Mindstorms NXT. It will be followed by a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the LEGO systems for classroom use. His talk will conclude with some ideas on how a language like Forth, combined with a LEGO-like robotics building system, could result in a much better learning experience.

16:00 --- Adjorn

If you have anything you'd like to talk about in October or for Forth Day, please contact Kevin Appert.