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> Since observing these Lego email broadcasts, I've been wondering what
> Forth was. Engineering background, not CS!
>
> Now I know, after reading Ralph Hempel's "RE: Mindstorms/reinforcement
> learning".
>
> Very cryptic by the looks! Why not use honest to goodness
> assembly language
> to do this stuff. It's really very easy, especially on Motorola CPUs. And
> its as fast as you can go! And using assembler really gives you a good
> feeling for what the microprocessor's doing.
There are a couple of reasons to choose pbFORTH over raw assembler...
1. Assembler requires an assembler, which means downloading and
configuring the GNU tools on eiher Linux or Cygwin for Win9x. Not
for the faint of heart.
2. Once you get your code assembled, you need to download it to the RCX.
You can use NQC, firmdl, or one of the new high speed downloaders. Not
too hard to do.
3. Your program will not work. Now you need to debug it. There are no
tools for this that are easy to use. Not for the faint of heart.
In all of these case, pbFORTH has a bit of an advantage...
1. pbFORTH requires that you load a precompiled, pre-tested image into the
RCX. You can use firmdl, NQC, or the TclTk based GUI that ships with
pbFORTH. The image is with the distribution too.
2. You don't need an assembler, or any complicated tools to use pbFORTH.
A simple terminal emulator or the TclTk GUI can be used to interactively
type or bulk download your ASCII scripts to the RCX.
3. For debugging, you can use print statements or drive the LCD. No, it's
not a symbolic debugger, but when I was learning to program, we put
print statements in our program and submitted them to the job queue....
pbFORTH is not too hard to learn. Assembler is not bad either, but it's
difficult to do a "Hello World" on the H8 embedded in the RCX. In pbFORTH
it's as simple as:
." Hello World" CR
If you (or the group) want more questions answered, by all means fire
away.
Cheers,
Ralph Hempel - P.Eng
--------------------------------------------------------
Check out pbFORTH for LEGO Mindstorms at:
<http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbFORTH>
--------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: rhempel at bmts dot com
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Forth vs Assembler
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| Since observing these Lego email broadcasts, I've been wondering what Forth was. Engineering background, not CS! Now I know, after reading Ralph Hempel's "RE: Mindstorms/reinforcement learning". Very cryptic by the looks! Why not use honest to (...) (25 years ago, 13-Oct-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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