Subject:
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RE: pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth
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Date:
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Sun, 9 Jan 2000 04:00:54 GMT
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Viewed:
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1319 times
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Ben,
Thanks for emailing and feeding back some important issues
for the rest of the Mindstorms pbForth community. I'll always
welcome comments and respond as quickly as possible...
Let me address each point, sorry about the quoting, but it's
needed for context. I get a bit defensive at the end because
I have spent a TON of time on this project. I take no personal
offense at anything in this note, and I'm trying to respond to
each point fairly. Sorry if the tone is not right all the time.
> So I've just been crawling over some broken glass, ERR, I mean, uploading
> pbFORTH text files to the RCX! It's hard to tell the difference! At the
> least, pbFORTH needs to:
>
> 1) accept \n, \r, \n\r or \r\n all as it does a single \r now.
I think the Forth standard required /r as the line terminator. This
is a perrenial issue with Unix/Mac/Windows systems. I'd like to add this
to the FAQ so that it is clear what is required.
> 2) have a mode to make it shut up during uploading. the errors are going to be
> lost anyway, and talking back just forces the terminal program to wait for long
> enough for the longest possible error to be printed so that the IR from the RCX
> doesn't clobber the next line.
I'm not sure what you mean by shut up. I already turned off the individual
echoes, what you are seeing is the tower echo. The error messages are there
to help you figure out what is going wrong.
> Preferably it should have some kind of fast binary upload.
Yes, and eventually I'll get around to building a cross-platform binary
compiler in Tcl. Until then, the RCX does a remarkably good job of compiling,
and you can always use SAVE-SYSTEM to get the binary image from your RCX
so it's faster to upload next time.
> Overall, pbFORTH is remarkably unfriendly:
>
> 1) Took me only 5 minutes to install the fw.
>
> 2) Took 1 hour to figure out the terminal settings (was working from the
> standard FW settings which have even parity). Finally found it by searching
> lugnet.
Later on in your note, you say caveat emptor. Here, I'll say "mea culpa" - I'm
guilty. I looked in my FAQ, and all over my site, and it is not clear at all
that the settings are 2400,n,8,1. This will go into the FAQ.
> 3) Took 5 minutes to get my first command, `hi', to execute.
>
> 4) Took 1 hour to get anything else to work, then I realized I needed RCX_INIT.
>
> 5) Took 5 minutes to write a test program.
>
> 6) Took 2 hours to write and test scripts to massage the textfiles and upload
> them to the RCX.
Yup. It does take time to learn a new language, and if you did this in 3 hours,
give or take, then I'm glad you stuck with it :-) Have a peek at the pbtest.txt
script - it has examples for just about every RCX word. There are also a lot
of useless scripts there - I'll get rid of them in the next release.
The massaging of scripts was probably done to reduce upload time...I have Tcl
and perl scripts for this too, but don't use them much. DOn't worry about
the upload time too much until you have big scripts.
> I can see why pbFORTH isn't widespread! It took me less time to get NQC
> running than the standard Mindstorms software! How is this easier than legOS?
But I'll bet you probably have programmed in C before. As a matter of fact, I
just used nqc for the first time this weekend because I forgot to install
CRT on my laptop and I couldn't upload any text files to pbForth! DUH!
Anyways, nqc is great! And I got a decent ammount done in a couple of hours.
pbForth is there if you run outside of the capabilities of nqc. As far as legOS goes,
Markus has spent a ton of time on it too. And thanks to guys like Luis Villa and
Gavin Smith there are precompiled binaries for the GNU tools for many platforms.
I'm sure you have scanned through the tales of woe trying to get the GNU tools
built. I can almost guarantee you that getting the GNU tools up on your machine
will take a day, and then you will probably get precompiled binaries like I did. :-)
I know I've been flogging pbForth a lot lately, and I really appreciate
the folks that have given their time and effort to help support the project.
Just like Dave Baum, I have a full time job and work on this in my spare time, and
I have a wife and three kids that need my attention too.
Thanks to this note, I have more stuff that can go into the FAQ.
If I can help in any way, please let me know and I'll do my best.
Cheers,
Ralph Hempel - P.Eng
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The train stops at the train station,
The bus stops at the bus station,
So why am I sitting at a work station?
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Reply to: rhempel at bmts dot com
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
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| In response to a message by Ben Jackson, Ralph Hempel wrote: <snip> (...) Actually Ralph, I think that was me. :) Although there are a few things *I've* said about pbforth that I don't like, you've given your reasons for the choices you've made to a (...) (25 years ago, 11-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)
| | | Re: pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
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| Ralph, Many of us out here REALLY DO appreciate the work that has gone into PBForth. I see it as a programming tool similar in spirit to the Emu movement out there. (ie the Atari and C64 emulators) Here you are moving the computing workload out of (...) (25 years ago, 20-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)
| | | Re: pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
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| (...) Getting a working legOS development evironment no longer takes a day. On Windows plateforms it only takes the time to download WinlegOS.exe (5.6Meg) and running the installer (a few minutes). The system is completely configured and ready to (...) (25 years ago, 2-Feb-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
|
| So I've just been crawling over some broken glass, ERR, I mean, uploading pbFORTH text files to the RCX! It's hard to tell the difference! At the least, pbFORTH needs to: 1) accept \n, \r, \n\r or \r\n all as it does a single \r now. 2) have a mode (...) (25 years ago, 8-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)
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