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Subject: 
Re: Tasks in RCX
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Tue, 21 Dec 1999 22:14:14 GMT
Viewed: 
614 times
  
alex wetmore wrote:

On Tue, 21 Dec 1999, Dennis Clark wrote:
In lugnet.robotics, Ram Meenakshisundaram writes:
Hi,

I read somewhere that the RCX is limited to only 10 concurrent tasks.
Is this limitation in the firmware?  If so, can I use a replacement
firmware like legOS to overcome this.  I basically want to have an
unlimited number of tasks so that I can port OCCAM-2 to the RCX.  Thanks

  <chuckle>  10 seems like a small number (yes its limited by the firmware)
until you try to use them all.  In my experience only email and webserver type
applications kick off more than 4 or 5 threads at once.

From some searching it appears that OCCAM-2 is a programming language
for parallel systems, so having a lot of threads probably is
desirable.  It also seems to me that implementing an existing
language on the RCX would generally involve new firmware anyway,
because the RCX firmware has so many limitations.  NQC does very
nicely using the standard firmware, but is missing basic programming
concepts such as arrays (a firmware limitation).

http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/occam/compilers/spoc/ has an OCCAM-2
to C compiler, which could perhaps be used with LegOS to get
something up and running on the RCX.  I have to wonder if OCCAM-2
is really designed to run in the limited memory environment of the
RCX though.


Sure why not.  The transputer parallel CPU was specifically designed to run
OCCAM and it only had 4K of internal RAM compared to the 32K.  However, it has
direct machine-level support for the OCCAM constructs.  I was actually planning on
using SPOC & legOS to run OCCAM.

Ram



--

       ,,,,
       /'^'\
      ( o o )
-oOOO--(_)--OOOo-------------------------------------
|                        Ram Meenakshisundaram
|                        Senior Software Engineer
|                        OpenLink Financial Inc
|  .oooO                 Phone: (516) 227-6600 x267
|  (   )   Oooo.         Email: rmeenaks@olf.com
---\ (----(   )--------------------------------------
     \_)    ) /
           (_/




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Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Tasks in RCX
 
(...) From some searching it appears that OCCAM-2 is a programming language for parallel systems, so having a lot of threads probably is desirable. It also seems to me that implementing an existing language on the RCX would generally involve new (...) (25 years ago, 21-Dec-99, to lugnet.robotics)

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