Forth Day 2009
Saturday, November 21st
at
Stanford University
Terman Engineering Center
Room 556

Meeting Agenda for Forth Day 2009

08:30 --- Coffee and a Chat

09:00 --- Welcome - George Perry
George, the SVFIG Chairman, will offer a few words of welcome and include some announcements about books and t-shirts.

Forth Applications

09:10 --- eForth in C - CH Ting
This the by far the simplest Forth ever written in C. Existing versions of Forth in C were all complicated because of C language requirements and the underlying operating system limitations. This implementation is based on a very simple Forth Virtual Machine written in C, which executes Forth words in a dictionary. This dictionary is constructed by an eForth metacompiler and inserted into a byte memory array in C. The Forth Machine can be quite simple, with as few as 31 primitives, or can be optimized to have 256 primitives.

09:40 --- PACE FIG-Forth - David Kilbridge
David Kilbridge was the implementer of the original FIG-Forth model for the PACE processor. He will provide a little insight into this processor and his implementation of the FIG model on it in the early days of the Forth Interest Group.

10:00 --- Resurrecting FIG-Forth through Simulation - Eric Smith
Eric will give a brief review of his work porting PACE FIG-Forth to his simulated IMP-16 and eventually to real hardware. He'll then describe the progress he's made since May.

10:15 --- Overview of the Forth Foundation Library - John E. Harbold
John will discuss code which makes use of the Forth equivalent of a C++ Class Library. The Forth Foundation Library (FFL) is a general purpose Forth library whose main purpose is to make it easier to develop applications. Examples include a Finite State Machine (FSM) and Dynamic Strings.

FFL project site

10:30 --- Break

10:40 --- Cheap, Simple, and Functional - Bob Nash
Using inexpensive hardware and free development tools, professional-quality, high-performance instrumentation can be designed quickly. This presentation will describe several of these development environments and show instruments that have been built with them.

11:10 --- Icon Forth - Brad Nelson
A picture is said to be worth a thousand words. Icon Forth replaces traditional Forth words with images and the dictionary is a collaboratively edited online database.

11:40 --- Discussion of a Native Forth for a NetBook - Sandy Bumgarner
"Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a cute, inexpensive, and complete computer that runs only Forth? Ah, nothing but you, Forth, and the hardware! Such a system could be built with an ASUS Eee PC and perhaps other netbooks. Let's talk about it ..."

12:10 --- A Moment of Remembrance and Celebration for Dave Boulton - Sandy Bumgarner and Cousin Bette

12:30 --- Lunch in Gibbons Grove - Catered by CH Ting
Adjacent to Terman Engineering Center

Forth Engines

13:30 --- Forth System on a Programmable Chip - Leon Wagner
"I will build a CFV1CORE_ALTERA System on a Programmable Chip (SOPC) design in the Altera Quartus II environment, program the design into a Cyclone III FPGA, and then interactively develop some Forth code to run on the newly instantiated core."

"The CFV1CORE_ALTERA, available free of charge from IPextreme, is the same V1 ColdFire processor core implemented in Freescale's MCF51QExx devices, but delivered as an SOPC Builder design optimized for the Altera Cyclone III FPGA. The V1 ColdFire system bus has been adapted to the Altera Avalon system interface for the CFV1CORE_ALTERA implementation."

IPextreme CFV1CORE_ALTERA

Altera Cyclone III Starter Kit (used in demo)

SwiftX

14:30 --- Venture Forth Toys - Dennis A. Ruffer
"While working at the IntellaSys Radio and RF division in Colorado, I came up with some plug-ins for their VentureForth compiler. I will give a brief introduction to them and explain why I found them to be useful."

VentureForth Compiler Plug-ins

Dennis' Linkedin profile

15:00 --- Break

15:10 --- IntellaSys Hearing Aid Project - Michael Montvelishsky
The bleeding edge of hearing aid technology is arcane and counter-intuitive. Michael will pull back the curtain and reveal the secrets behind the DSP black magic. This may be the most remarkable real-world application of the IntellaSys SeaForth processor.

15:50 --- New Code on the New Hardware - Jeff Fox
Jeff will give a live interactive demonstration of the colorForth tethered IDE as well as take up topics from his blog and show off this year's chips.

16:30 --- Square Root Routine for the c18 (s40 CPU) - John Rible
John will discuss his colorforth implementation of a 32-bit square root routine for the c18 (s40 cpu) and talk about the eForth interface he used to test it.

17:00 --- Fireside Chat - Chuck Moore 18:00 --- Adjourn 18:20 --- Dinner Banquet Su Hong 1039 El Camino Real Menlo Park 650/323-6852

Su Hong Map

How you can help SVFIG:

• Bring your speaker and topic suggestions to every meeting!
• Your input for and participation in next year's Forth Day is always welcomed.

Coming to SVFIG in January:

• SVFIG Treasurer's Report - John Rible

• Quantum Computing - Jack J. Woehr
  Presentation by telephone

  Jack's Quantum Computing Blog

  jwoehr -at- softwoehr.com

Coming to SVFIG:

Engineering TV
Fifty engineering topic channels, four new episodes per week.

Botbash 2000 Video
A cheapie video of a May 2000 robot rumble in Mesa, AZ.

WAV File and Soundcard I/O Software Using Win32Forth - Andy Korsak
This software was written for amateur radio applications. Andy has suggested that it might be useful to look at his code in advance of his talk. Contributions to this work-in-progress would be welcomed. You can download and view his sound card software on the Win32Forth group (membership required), or here.

Solicitations for presentations and assistance:

Mitch Bradley's Forth in C
A volunteer is needed to present and demonstrate this software.

PowerMops Forth for the Mac - Kevin Appert
Kevin Appert: "Mops is an open-source, full-featured, object-oriented stand-alone programming language for Mac OS X descended from the much-beloved NEON. I now have a working installation and when I know enough to do a good demo, I’ll be doing a talk. I’d be grateful for any help and advice from anyone familiar with PowerMOPS.”

PowerMops on SourceForge

Carbon Mac Forth - Kevin Appert
Kevin Appert: "Mac Forth was the first programming language used on the bench to bring up the Mac and the first programming language with Mac API available to the public. I have substantial interest in the current version, Carbon Mac Forth and I’m hoping to do what I can to promote it. I'm unable to contact Ward McFarland, the Carbon MacForth guy. If anybody knows a good way to buy a copy, please fill me in! His email appears full and he doesn't reply. The phone number is out of service, but the website is still up. I’m hoping that if Carbon Mac Forth is now an orphan, we can make all the source and executable available on our website.

Please indicate your interest for these topics:

• Viewing of Analog by Design shows hosted by Bob Pease - list of shows
• Review and discussion of recent postings on news:comp.lang.forth
• Review and discussion of interesting Forth projects and many files at the Yahoo Win32Forth Group

If you have anything you'd like to talk about at Forth Day,
please contact Kevin Appert.