Hello from East Coast USA

markboston36 · Post by **markboston36** » Wed Oct 21, 2020 3:23 am

Hi im from the east coast of the US(if you look at my username you can probably figure out where.) ive never messed with any 8 bit machines being the right age to remember such things my first computer was a mac 128k that my brother got for college and then several other macs he got from school(he was not in CS but took some CS courses). I am really into vintage computers and do have some. Currently my collection includes a B&W G3 and a mac classic(non color). After college he got an ibm desktop(don't know the model) and thats the machine i played DOTT and all the 16 bit classic games we all know.

I never did any programming as a child only because my brother never taught me and i didn't even know such a thing was possible. Now my interests involve computers both hardware and software and learning about old and obsolete systems.

Since i never experienced 8-bit computers this is something i would be interested in buying and messing around with. Not only playing games but writing my own. Currently my language of choice is common lisp specifically sbcl. i also like python and ive sporadically tried to teach my self c and c++ with varying degrees of success.

I look forward to meeting everyone and experiencing this blast from the past.

rje · Post by **rje** » Wed Oct 21, 2020 3:17 pm

You sound like you might fit into the core demographic for this sort of machine: "I want 8-bit hardware without the vintage tax of maintenance and breakdowns."

Welcome!

markboston36 · Post by **markboston36** » Wed Oct 21, 2020 5:42 pm

2 hours ago, rje said:

You sound like you might fit into the core demographic for this sort of machine: "I want 8-bit hardware without the vintage tax of maintenance and breakdowns."

Welcome!

no i fit into the group of "take my money i want everything". ive been wanting to buy an actual c64 for a long time however since moving i do not know where i would put it. at least with this is a smaller(?) package that can go infront of an old tv or monitor. i have messed both with VICE and retropie.

rje · Post by **rje** » Thu Oct 22, 2020 1:56 pm

LOL! Ok, that works too!

BruceMcF · Post by **BruceMcF** » Mon Nov 09, 2020 9:40 am

I don't know if a Common Lisp will be implemented for it, but it seems more likely than python. When my upper-class courses are done in December I will be jumping back into working on a Forth implementation, which at least shares the approach of programming by adding functions written in part with functions you've already written.

rje · Post by **rje** » Tue Nov 10, 2020 5:01 pm

Given Bruce and others around here, Forth is likely. I'd like it to be on the ROM...

LISP is less likely, but only because it doesn't yet have a champion. Find a champion for it, and it will happen.

Python, Perl, and other modern scripting languages would only show up as weaker variants. That doesn't mean it can't or won't happen -- a champion for one of these would make it work. But it does mean that the language will be significantly smaller than its typical version.

SlithyMatt · Post by **SlithyMatt** » Tue Nov 10, 2020 6:17 pm

1 hour ago, rje said:

Given Bruce and others around here, Forth is likely. I'd like it to be on the ROM...

LISP is less likely, but only because it doesn't yet have a champion. Find a champion for it, and it will happen.

Python, Perl, and other modern scripting languages would only show up as weaker variants. That doesn't mean it can't or won't happen -- a champion for one of these would make it work. But it does mean that the language will be significantly smaller than its typical version.

Forth is an excellent and era-appropriate language to have in ROM, even if it is a bit esoteric. It would be a very powerful alternative to BASIC. There was mention on another thread of RPL, but it's too close to Forth and given the choice, I think Forth would be the way to go. I still have my HP 48G calculator that I can play around with RPL on, if I so desire.

Are there any Lisp champions left, outside of emacs die-hards? I'd hate for people to wear out the parentheses keys on their X16 keyboards. ?

Python and Perl would be painfully slow in standard form, requiring the use of massively scaled down versions of the languages. I know they are out there, but mainly as curiosities. If people want a curiosity, they can load it themselves via SD Card -- no need to take up ROM space.

rje · Post by **rje** » Wed Nov 11, 2020 3:17 pm

20 hours ago, SlithyMatt said:

Forth is an excellent and era-appropriate language to have in ROM, even if it is a bit esoteric. It would be a very powerful alternative to BASIC. There was mention on another thread of RPL, but it's too close to Forth and given the choice, I think Forth would be the way to go. I still have my HP 48G calculator that I can play around with RPL on, if I so desire.

Yes - I "found" RPL yesterday when cruising Scott Robson's git projects. I think RPL is just a dialect of FORTH. While reading its manual, I didn't see any reason to pick it; however, I do think some of its claims to superiority are worth checking out and incorporating into an X16 FORTH if true and if reasonable.

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Are there any Lisp champions left, outside of emacs die-hards? I'd hate for people to wear out the parentheses keys on their X16 keyboards. ?

Of course there are. And, there will be a few converts from modern programmers. Like FORTH, it is easy to parse.

I'm not one of those champions, though.

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Python and Perl would be painfully slow in standard form, requiring the use of massively scaled down versions of the languages. I know they are out there, but mainly as curiosities. If people want a curiosity, they can load it themselves via SD Card -- no need to take up ROM space.

I've thought a lot about this, and I agree with you. In fact, most modern languages, when ported to the 6502, would reduce down to something resembling the older structured languages from the early 70s. The syntactic sugar might vary, but I believe at the interpreted level they would very much resemble each other more than they do today.

My web-acquaintance Alex had actually started porting csh. As soon as he said it, I realized that that was the viable scripting language I had wanted.

paulscottrobson · Post by **paulscottrobson** » Mon Nov 16, 2020 2:16 pm

RPL isn't a dialect of FORTH really. Well it is semantically, but it's actually interpreted. You can edit the lines on the fly with the screen editor and just run it, no compiling or anything. It's ancestor is Reverse Polish Basic, which was on a machine in Wireless World and a Netronics Elf (I think). It just takes it to extremes.

It has the problem almost all languages have for the X16 ; the processor is too slow for the hardware if you don't write assembler, and anything that compiles to machine code is too bulky, and anything that uses a P-Code has a 90% CPU performance hit. This is about as far as you can go.

I am working on a solution which can generate 6502 / P-Code interchangeably and takes advantage of the 90/10 rule, while still being fairly readable and less eccentric than RPL and Lean, though more so than XCPL.

paulscottrobson · Post by **paulscottrobson** » Mon Nov 16, 2020 2:20 pm

FORTH is actually slightly worse. The core code is the same, pretty much, but because I can limit lines to under 128 16 bit words ... by not allowing it .... I can use inx ; inx ; jmp ($xxxx,x) because x never overflows. The classical FORTH that Bruce is working (I think) can't do that ; so there's an extra test in there for X overflowing.

You have the same problem as ever. You've only got one stack and two things that need stacking. I have a Z80 language which is FORTH with one stack basically (makes less difference than you'd think) , but it doesn't work on a 6502 (because the Z80 has 16 bit register operations, more registers, and EX DE,HL).