Re: Cross compiling

[Ethan Gardener]

On Mon, Mar 1, 2021, at 7:40 PM, Josh Grams wrote:
> On 2021-03-01 07:32PM, Ethan Gardener wrote:
> >jonesforth.f is shorter than jonesforth.S, but so much of both files are 
> >comments, it's hard to compare the code sizes.
> 
> But they're not the same thing, are they? They're two parts of the same 
> system. jonesforth.S is the core engine that is written in asm, 
> jonesforth.f is the rest of the system that builds on top and is 
> written in Forth.

I was responding to Anton Ertl's comment, "Assembly language is not a 
particularly nice way of writing Forth
code, though (and most of a Forth system is written in Forth);" particularly 
with a view to what proportion of Jonesforth is assembly language. Looks like 
Francesco Ariis has the answer: about 1/3. It could be less if cross-compiled.

> >I imagine JonesForth's double-indirect threading would be good for 8-bit 
> >systems.
> 
> Did he ever get his terminology straight? That was always my main beef 
> with JonesForth: he didn't understand what direct/indirect threading 
> actually referred to. I tried to help straighten things out (as did, I 
> think, a couple of the long-time comp.lang.forth regulars) but he was 
> sure that he knew better than anyone else.

Ah. I guess I'll have to conceed this point; if Richard Jones got it wrong, so 
have I. (I've never been good with terminology and never read as much as I 
should.) Whatever the terminology, JF's design of compiling definitions to 
lists of addresses seems good for small-memory systems.