9 Jan
2012
9 Jan
'12
9:46 p.m.
On Jan 9, 2012, at 4:03 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
dwight elvey wrote:
Both of these, of course, were why Open Firmware's boot code was tokenized Forth (they
called it FCode). In theory, you could boot the same card in a Sun as in a PowerPC Mac,
though I imagine that seldom worked as well as anyone intended; anyone ever tried?
- Dave
What a horrible thing to do with Forth but I see
why one might want to do something like that.
If you're referring to token-threading, there are a lot of good reasons for it. Two
of the most obvious:
1) Code density: the tokens for the most common Forth words are a single byte.
2) Portability: the mainframe ROM tokens don't change when the ROMs are revised, so
programs in plug-in ROMs aren't dependent on the addresses of the Forth words in the
mainframe ROM remaining constant. This also applies to cases where one plug-in ROM calls
another.