Re:Show HN: A 16-bit Forth machine written in VHDL
by fernly on Sunday August 03, 2014 @10:35PM
(#8130028)
So what are some of the possible things one could do with this? What remains to make it the basis of a interactive FORTH system that could be hooked to a serial terminal and used, e.g. in a classroom? (Would that be a useful thing to do? Or would it be better as an embedded node?)
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Re:Show HN: A 16-bit Forth machine written in VHDL
by inforichland on Sunday August 03, 2014 @10:47PM
(#8130061)
I guess the unstated goal of this was to create a small, simple and fast soft-core processor that could be used to augment FPGA designs (<15% of a small devices resources @ 100MHz).
Honestly, I wrote this just to scratch an itch. I've always loved the elegance of Forth, and having stumbled upon (http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/index.html) that, I decided to create my own, with the goal of having single-cycle execution of all non-control-flow operations. Having said that, one could easily take it, and probably fairly quickly implement the Forth interpreter and use it in a classroom if they desired. I guess the explicit goal was an embedded node, but it's fairly flexible.