* John R. Hogerhuis jhogerhuis@yahoo.com [020521 07:14]:
Ok, I downloaded paflof, got it building. I think you're right, Segher's code looks pretty clean. Just out of curiosity, I think there are forth-in-Cs already implemented under GPL, why not use one of them?
Most of what I've looked at is nice, but uses a different approach than what we really want. Either they compile to native code, which is nice, but not really needed and it makes the thing bigger and more complex than needed. Others try to care for lots of system interoperation issues which we don't really need. Starting from scratch normally looks like a not too smart idea, but in this case i think it is, as we know exactly that we have no overhead whatsoever. Even with lots of optimazation it might be hard to get gforth or alikes down to the size paflof has, or will have, when it's done. Every byte we safe here, means we have more space for the packages that will live on top of paflof, be it the debugging facilities, drivers, ...
How do I know which words still need implementation? How do I take ownership (make sure no duplication of work).
The only source is the code, and probably Segher ;) None of the highlevel words, like package handling, properties, exceptions, have been touched in connection with paflof. It probably makes sense to push these forward until paflof is far enough to be able to execute fcode. Also the existing tokenizer/detokenizer need a lot of testing, which I can only do little, as I am not a long time forth expert. ;)
For taking ownership for a certain task just drop a note to this list about what your ideas are. This list has been low or rather zero traffic for a while; As far as I know only Segher and me are looking at the code currently so chances that you do duplicate work are naturally pretty low.
I've started reading the IEEE 1275 spec, I should be done soon.
For anyone interested, this is the main information source that should be used for implementation - A lot of information is available in the Docs section of the OpenBIOS homepage: http://www.freiburg.linux.de/OpenBIOS/docs/
Feel free to respond to me on the list rather than directly. I'm subscribed now, but I wasn't sure how basic of information you wanted showing up on the list.
I think it is a good idea not to keep this discussion secret, as there's enough to do for _a lot_ of developers ;)
Stefan