[bugfix-66]

Look at the Green Arrays F18, the "conclusion" that Forth reached:

https://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/greg/PB003-11...

Here's a clear description of what each instruction does:

https://colorforth.github.io/forth.html

Hilariously, the system has no logical OR, only AND and XOR and NOT, because "Inclusive-or is rarely needed."

This system was designed by Chuck Moore, father of Forth. Here is an entertaining video of him explaining the F18A stack machine and programming system:

https://youtu.be/0PclgBd6_Zs

This is such a simple machine. I am planning to make a tiny emulator for my site. One could probably write an emulator in 80 lines of Go (one goroutine for each of the 144 cores).

[whatshisface]

>The word */ multiplies by a ratio, with a double-length intermediate product. It eliminates the need for floating-point.

Anyone who knows a lot about numeric stuff care to comment on this statement?

[bugfix-66]

It's just a fixed point instruction.

Fixed point multiply: a*m times b*m yields (a*b)*m = a*m * b*m / m

In the above, m is the fixed point 1. For example, 65536 for a 16.16 fixed point.

The instruction allows you to multiply a*m by b*m and then divide by m, renormalizing your fixed point result.

Chuck Moore thinks nobody needs floating point because fixed point is sufficient!

[Someone]

And, importantly, the double-length intermediate result prevents the rapid loss of precision, compared to the naive alternatives of

  : */ * 65536 / :

and

  : */ 65536 / * ;