2026-07-09 01:13:12 <cleobuline  > https://labynet.fr/videos/gaz.mp4
2026-07-09 02:22:27 <DKordic     > lofty: Closure would be useful.  I think it is absolutely BASIC.  BTW ""Standard Forth"" has ""loops"" from FORTRAN BASIC and even BASIC.  How wonderful is that?
2026-07-09 02:24:35 <xentrac     > DKordic: to what do 'Closure', your first 'BASIC', '""Standard Forth"", '""loops""', and 'FORTRAN BASIC' refer?
2026-07-09 02:25:05 <xentrac     > Because I am failing to extract any coherent meaning from your utterance
2026-07-09 02:25:22 <DKordic     > Sorry, typo.  I forgot.
2026-07-09 02:28:57 <DKordic     > Various ""loop"" constructs in ""Standard"" forth are inspired by FORTRAN, [I forgot], and even BASIC.
2026-07-09 02:30:17 <DKordic     > xentrac: Subroutine Closure, of course.
2026-07-09 02:31:25 <xentrac     > are you talking about closures in the sense in which Scheme can encapsulate state into closures instead of objects with methods?
2026-07-09 02:32:17 <DKordic     > Yes.  What is so surprising, confusing, or unclear?
2026-07-09 02:34:15 <DKordic     > On the implementation side, it is wonderful that we have RISC-V today.  And in particular RP2040 and ESP32-P4.
2026-07-09 02:35:17 <xentrac     > You said, 'I think it is absolutely BASIC.'  Does 'it' here refer to closures?  Does 'BASIC' here refer to the programming language BASIC?
2026-07-09 02:36:13 <xentrac     > I ask because normally 'it' would require a singular referent, rather than a plural one like 'closures'.
2026-07-09 02:36:58 <xentrac     > and BASIC doesn't have closures, and it isn't clear what it would mean for closures to 'be absolutely' a certain programming language.
2026-07-09 02:41:14 <xentrac     > If you can elucidate these confusions, maybe we can move on to how to interpret your innovative use of punctuation.
2026-07-09 02:45:53 <tabemann    > ich bin sehr verwirrend
2026-07-09 02:57:28 <DKordic     > xentrac: You are absolutely correct.  Sorry.  ""It"" should have reffered to that ""Machine Forth""... program snippet.  It reminds me of the level of excellence characteristic of BASIC.  Contrast ""GoTo"" (BASIC) and ""Branch and Link with Register"" (ARM or RISC-V).
2026-07-09 04:13:12 <xentrac     > DKordic: I am not making any progress at understanding what you intended to communicate.  When you say, "You are absolutely correct," which of my assertions or questions were you referring to?
2026-07-09 04:17:12 <xentrac     > when you say, '""It"" should have reffered to that ""Machine Forth""... program snippet.', is the quadruple-quoted and capitalized 'It' intended to refer to the occurrence of unquoted and uncapitalized 'it' in 'I think it is absolutely BASIC.' that I had conjectured might refer to closures?  Are you saying that you wish that instead of referring to closures, you had been referring to a snippet of Forth?
2026-07-09 04:17:18 <xentrac     > Or perhaps that you *were* referring to a snippet of Forth?
2026-07-09 04:19:41 <xentrac     > I could continue with such questions at much greater length, but I am not sure it would be of any use.  Why don't you start again from the beginning and just re-express your original thought in a clearer form?
2026-07-09 04:21:40 <lofty       > xentrac: did you see my original message that I think DKordic is responding to?
2026-07-09 04:21:48 <xentrac     > I don't think so
2026-07-09 04:22:09 <lofty       > http://www.euroforth.org/ef00/ceballos00.pdf <--- is the code in Table 3 actually any clearer to anyone else?
2026-07-09 04:22:24 <xentrac     > did it contain a program snippet in Machine Forth in some kind of horrific style reminiscent of BASIC?
2026-07-09 04:25:28 <lofty       > I mean I'm too young for BASIC
2026-07-09 04:25:30 <xentrac     > hmm, it has two versions of inner-product
2026-07-09 04:26:04 <xentrac     > both are pretty bad but the second one looks less bad at first glance
2026-07-09 04:26:18 <xentrac     > I mean, not bad as in "incompetent"
2026-07-09 04:26:22 <DKordic     > xentrac: whoops :) .  I wasn't expecting I would be this difficult.  Sorry.  Doubled quotes are a way of escaping the quote... in a way.
2026-07-09 04:26:25 <xentrac     > bad as in "difficult"
2026-07-09 04:27:54 <lofty       > the second one is the Machine Forth version, but I find it very hard to read, and I couldn't tell if that's because it was actually harder to read or I'm still inexperienced. (both can be true I suppose)
2026-07-09 04:28:09 <xentrac     > lofty: in BASIC you can call a subroutine with arguments 53 and W + 1 and put the result in the variable N with code like 2300 A = 53 : B = W + 1 : GOSUB 5000 : N = X
2026-07-09 04:28:39 <xentrac     > assuming the subroutine takes its arguments in variables A and B and returns its result in X
2026-07-09 04:28:46 <xentrac     > and starts at line 5000
2026-07-09 04:29:20 <lofty       > ah, okay
2026-07-09 04:29:21 <xentrac     > to draw an X by Y rectangle of asterisks in ASCII art you might say
2026-07-09 04:29:33 <xentrac     > 4800 FOR I = 1 to Y
2026-07-09 04:29:47 <xentrac     > 4810 FOR J = 1 TO X
2026-07-09 04:29:59 <xentrac     > 4820 PRINT "*";
2026-07-09 04:30:07 <xentrac     > 4830 NEXT J
2026-07-09 04:30:17 <xentrac     > 4840 PRINT
2026-07-09 04:30:24 <xentrac     > 4850 NEXT I
2026-07-09 04:30:44 <xentrac     > although you can also pack all of that onto a single line with colons if you want
2026-07-09 04:31:49 <DKordic     > What is stopping us from creating "A" (Address) `Value' like "Machine Forth" pre-defines?  I have an impression the author thinks it can not be done!!
2026-07-09 04:31:58 <xentrac     > I don't know that the Machine Forth version would be easy if I knew Machine Forth well
2026-07-09 04:32:13 <xentrac     > DKordic: what?
2026-07-09 04:33:12 <lofty       > I think DKordic is trying to say that the ANS Forth code is bad because it's doing everything on the stack without defining variables to make things easier?
2026-07-09 04:33:12 <xentrac     > I suspect it would be easy because the pointers are staying in the same registers the whole time
2026-07-09 04:37:41 <xentrac     > but I don't really remember how the F18A (or MuP21? or ShBoom? maybe I should read at least the abstract?) uses its registers
2026-07-09 04:38:41 <DKordic     > Why would we ever use such a "Global Variable" (like that A)?  It doesn't even make sense in (for example) Python: it is a module variable.  Creating a Subroutine Closure should be an obvious thing to do.  Variable names are better than "comment"s.  Some call it "Self-Documenting Code".
2026-07-09 04:39:11 <lofty       > This would be ShBoom, xentrac, except it's now called Ignite :p
2026-07-09 04:39:25 <xentrac     > haha
2026-07-09 04:40:18 <lofty       > DKordic: it's a hardware register, not just a global variable.
2026-07-09 04:42:50 <DKordic     > lofty: Yeah, right.  Innocent until proven guilty.  Seems like quackery to me.  Oddly enough Python Type System... the whole "language" is a quack :) .
2026-07-09 04:44:09 <lofty       > (Also I have come to believe that self-documenting code is a myth, but anyway)
2026-07-09 04:45:48 <DKordic     > It is merely an idea.  Maybe even a vague idea.
2026-07-09 04:47:06 <lofty       > (I feel like "why it was written this way" is just as important as "what was written", and it's very difficult to infer the "why" from code alone.)
2026-07-09 04:48:33 <DKordic     > IMHO Self-Documenting Code is far more interesting than "comment"s.  "Comment"s are so stupid that they should not be defined.
2026-07-09 04:50:58 <DKordic     > IMHO "code" is a symptom of incompetence.  How about "expression" or "factor" instead?
2026-07-09 04:51:39 <xentrac     > DKordic: I'm not managing to make any sense of your utterances
2026-07-09 04:51:49 <xentrac     > lofty: yes, I agree
2026-07-09 04:52:31 <DKordic     > lofty: Don't You think You are propagating the confusion by choosing "code" rather than something more meaningful?
2026-07-09 04:53:57 <xentrac     > DKordic: normally in English the word "you" is only capitalized in the middle of a sentence when addressing one or more deities.  are you implicitly asserting that lofty is God?
2026-07-09 04:54:08 <DKordic     > Thank You for feedback.  I will do my best to correct that.
2026-07-09 04:54:17 <xentrac     > Correct what?
2026-07-09 04:54:50 <xentrac     > I think we're being trolled by a large language model
2026-07-09 04:55:14 <DKordic     > Correct my utterances.  I did not know that.
2026-07-09 04:56:41 <xentrac     > lofty: I suppose in ANSI Forth you could do something like variable p  : p@ p @ @ ;  : p++@ p@ p @ cell+ p ! ; and so on and get the equivalent of the A register
2026-07-09 05:03:38 <DKordic     > xentrac: You have disapointed me.
2026-07-09 05:05:27 <xentrac     > DKordic: although I made a lot of effort to ask clarifying questions, you haven't answered any of them
2026-07-09 05:05:43 <xentrac     > well, I think you did answer one
2026-07-09 05:06:09 <xentrac     > the one I asked about Scheme
2026-07-09 21:42:18 <crc         > DKordic: as lofty noted, in machine forth, for cm's architecture, A (and B) are hardware registers, and the A/B words mapped to instructions using this for efficiency reasons. It's not a global variable in the normal sense.
2026-07-09 21:46:37 <crc         > if you need a reference for that, https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB003-110412-F18A.pdf
2026-07-09 21:49:23 <crc         > lofty: I wouldn't necessarily expect a bit of machine forth to be easily readable
2026-07-09 21:49:27 <crc         > machine forth is pretty much intended to be low level, more like assembly than a higher level forth
2026-07-09 21:49:47 <crc         > though the higher level implementation that table showed as a comparison isn't much more readable IMO.
2026-07-09 21:56:56 <lofty       > crc: the author _presents_ it as being readable, and I was wondering if me being unable to understand it was due to my own inexperience, or whether it genuinely was just unreadable
2026-07-09 22:00:46 <crc         > it might be easier to understand, depending on one's knowledge of the words used and the machine forth & its instruction set
2026-07-09 22:01:13 <crc         > I personally don't find either to be easy to follow from a quick read
2026-07-09 23:33:14 <crc         > lofty: (untested) I'd probably write this like so in my Forths, where I have some data flow combinators for stack stuff:
2026-07-09 23:33:21 <crc         > :~product   (ab-abc)  dup-pair &fetch &fetch bi* n:mul ;
2026-07-09 23:33:21 <crc         > :~next-pair (ab-a'b') &n:inc [ @SIDE-SIZE n:add ] bi* ;
2026-07-09 23:43:08 <crc         > (not that this is is any more readable unless you know my vocabulary and combinator patterns)