MSP432 and Forth

TO: OLD_COW_YELLOW. Sorry I did not get back to you sooner. I had to get out a USDA SBIR Phase I grant proposal by Thursday Oct 6th at 5 pm. Got it out at wed at 11 pm and spent the day cleaning up the office mess that accumulated during the months of the proposal write. Forth. I am a Forth newbie. I have a bunch of books written in 1986 and have read Charles Moore's Programming a Problem which he wrote in 1970 (I have it on my kindle).  I am the type of person that I have to know everything before I know anything. I have never really written a Forth program. With the ARM I was going to use Jones Forth as a template and write it in assembler with macros for NEXT etc. The MSP432 is Harvard architecture. Thus no assembly in DATA store. So I was going to put the primitives in flash dictionary space and the secondaries in the DATA dictionary. So no Forth assembler. The first thing I plan to write in Forth is a data dumping program. The 4 byte address, the 16 bytes of data and 16 bytes of ASCII. This will probably be on a VIC20 as that is the only computer I have a Forth cartridge for. I guess I could get a forth for windows or Linux. I would like to write Forth in C but pForth is hard to understand. I guess I could use subroutine calls for the dictionary. I need to do more exploring and understanding to do this. I plan a MSP432 commercial product with two SDCARDs for program and data . Can't decide if I should set up pins for arduino shield or TI shields.   Are you the 4004 guru? 

Alvin,

Thanks for your reply.

Alvin P. Schmitt said:

I am the type of person that I have to know everything before I know anything.

I think I am like that too. I do not have faith in ready made software tools nor my ability to understand and properly use them. I think I more or less do understand how the CPU hardware works. Likewise the CPU only knows to follow the object code and knows nothing about the software tools. As a result, I use assembly most of the time. When I use c, I would examine the assembly listing to make sure it did what I expect to do. I never use things like Energia and MSP-Wave, they are too complex for me to comprehend.

Alvin P. Schmitt said:

I have never really written a Forth program.

Nether did I. I played with a few Forth and have some idea about the essence Forth and I like that. I particular, I examined the MSP430 version of CamelForth in detail (but that is not an ARM.)

Alvin P. Schmitt said:

With the ARM I was going to use Jones Forth as a template and write it in assembler with macros for NEXT etc.

Could you tell me the URLs of details of Jones Forth that you have read?

--OCY

Bluehash has code here that uses the "SD over SPI" mode in an SD card. So far as I know, there is no implementation that uses a USB device (although I'm interested should you have found one). How is it going

with your Forth implementation? I am investigating mecrisp now which reportedly supports the MSP432 LaunchPad out of the box.

Have not done anything with forth. Am considering a compiled BASIC that puts out intermediate code (ALBAL assembler) for an abstract machine (ALBAM) I am in the process of developing. The limited ram of 64k will probably mean that the abstract machine and its assembler, loader and editor will be resident on the MSP432 and the compiler on the attached PC unless I can fit it in. Going to a commodore 64 like basic since it is familiar to most people unlike forth. Would have two SDCARDs one for program and one for data so the data card can be removed and a new one put in so that the data can be processed. 

Hi Alvin, thanks for the summary. Your project sounds interesting! What is your motivation? Do you already build custom product and this is a better way to develop the firmware? I was hoping to find an existing thriving community build around an existing environment, such as Forth.

By the way, the Forth people seem to be a good bunch. I posted to Jan 21 to the Forth Google Groups and the replies are still coming (of course, the thread has long diverged from my original post about porting to the msp432, but has stayed with embedded and FPGAs). https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.forth/lErxCIvURgs