[svfig-announce] Meeting: 2004 January 24

[Juggler Vain]

SVFIG
Meeting Agenda for
Saturday, January 24, 2004
at
Cogswell College
1175 Bordeaux Dr.
Sunnyvale, CA

09:45 	
Starbucks Coffee, Tea, Bagels, and Pastries

10:30 	
Getting Beyond the GUI: How the Mac Came To Be, Why it and Windows are 
Fossils, and Getting to The Humane Environment's Future - Jef Raskin
"Because it does not use the standard GUI conventions of interaction 
(you can't create a better interface if it's the same as what's being 
done), The Humane Environment (THE) is difficult to implement, 
especially in a cross-platform manner. Our mono-platform version some 
years ago was done in Forth with superb results. I will explain the 
advantages of THE, demonstrate it running (in Python, sorry) and put out 
some easy challenges and hard challenges to Forth programmers in the Q&A 
portion of the talk. I come not only to teach and preach about interface 
design, but also to hear and learn from the best Forth minds on 
implementing with Forth in the present world."     See Meeting Notes for 
a related Wired News article.

12:00 	
Lunch - on your own: Togos or other local eateries

13:00 	
Introductions, Announcements, Rumors, and Gossip

13:10 	
More on "Mippy" - Randy Thelen
Randy will continue his discussion on Mippy, a TTL-based Forth computer. 
He will focus on the instruction execution process from instruction 
fetch, through decode, into execution, including a branch instruction.

14:40 	
Short Break

14:45 	
Three Ting Topics - CH Ting

Object Oriented Forth - What's inside of the FML Browser
FML is a Forth based browser and implemented some Object Oriented 
features. Ting will discuss the general structures in FML and how the 
Forth interpreter is turned into a XML-like browser.

Ellipse Drawing
Ting has found an easy way to draw ellipses. As in the algorithm to draw 
circles, only addition and comparison operations are needed in the 
drawing process.

eP32 Microprocessor Book
Ting's new book on the eP32 microprocessor has been published in Taiwan 
by O'Reily. It is written in Chinese, although all the code are in 
Forth, except the CPU design, which is in VHDL. He will bring a copy to 
the meeting.

16:00 	
Adjourn

After meeting 	
Possible dinner at a location to be determined.

Coming in February:

muForth - A Look under the Hood: The Bootstrap Process - David Frech
    David will visit all the interesting parts of the muForth system by 
walking through the bootstrap process.

        * dictionary structure
        * tokenizer
        * (text) interpreter
        * native compiler
        * C kernel's interaction with Forth
        * create/does architecture

    "By looking at each of these in turn, we will see not only how the 
system, which starts with quite a bare kernel, lifts itself up (by its 
bootstraps of course ;-) to become a quite usable system, but also what 
makes it unusual (as Forth systems go)."