[sdiy] microcontroller selection!

[ASSI]

On Tuesday 12 August 2003 00:17, Hermann Seib wrote:
> > Better yet, goeth FORTH and leve those closed worlds behind. :-)
>
> Oh? Tried that some 20 years ago (there was a great Forth article
> series in the Byte magazine in... oh, 1981 or 1982, that made me look
> at it). It was quite fast on my Apple ///, but this page-oriented
> design and the RPN style drove me crazy (that's why I had a TI-59 and
> no theoretically superior HP pocket calculator at the time :-). What
> has become of Forth in the meantime? Something more usable?

It is still stack oriented and thus RPN. It does not have to be page 
oriented (actually it is called screen in FORTH). The application that 
you write does not need to have any traces of both if that's what you 
want, but then you need to write an input parser for whatever language 
you think is suitable. I know FORTH isn't for everyone, I still 
mentioned it because it a) is low footprint and happily works on almost 
any microcontroller architecture, b) is almost as efficient as 
assembler, but considerably more portable and easier to write (once you 
got the hang of it) and c) you develop the system while it is working 
instead of compile, crash, burn and doing it all over. There are 
(cross-)compilers out there for FORTH, but that's missing the point 
IMHO.

Try http://www.forth.org/ http://www.taygeta.com/forth.html or 
http://www.forth.com/ for more information.

So, if you have a low-budget microcontroller as a "programmable" module 
in your setup (which was the start of this thread), I think the most 
efficient way to work with that is if you can re-program it on the 
spot, via terminal access or by loading the desired program from 
something like a MMC or other (serial) memory. The basic interpreters 
are too slow for many of the tasks you might want to do and I don't 
think anyone would want to have a PC in his modular just to compile 
code for a module containing a microcontroller...


Achim.

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