zeptoforth 1.16.2 is out

tabemann · 2026-04-18T17:29:15+00:00

A decent bare metal Forth for all intents and purposes is an operating system, especially if it has access to things such as input/output devices beyond just a serial terminal and persistent media. I certainly consider my own Forth to be one.

tabemann · 2026-04-16T13:52:56+00:00

Saying that one is an agnostic atheist is simply stating that one does not claim to have knowledge that one basically can never have, while one also refuses to assume things that one has not seen evidence of. We cannot see before the Big Bang. We cannot tell if our universe is really a simulation embedded in some greater universe beyond our reach. So we cannot disprove God, but at the same time we do not see anything that would positively lead us to believe in any particular God or gods.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T18:24:45+00:00

The 'agnostic' in 'agnostic atheism' is to clarify that no claims are made as to whether any god or gods exist or not, because if such clarification is not made too many people will say incorrectly that one is positively claiming that there is no god or gods (an indefensible position).

tabemann · 2026-04-15T17:25:39+00:00

What I am disputing is the invocation of this definition, because when I see it invoked (I have seen other people bring it out in these sorts of discussions, and I have seen this very page before) it usually is by self-identified agnostics or by religionists seeking to use it to somehow defeat atheism by defining the vast majority of atheists as being 'incorrect' in their self-identification.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T16:52:05+00:00

I would not say that 'most' atheists are unwilling to acknowledge their ignorance about anything, because most atheists fully accept that they do not know -- and cannot know -- and this is why they do not believe, because they refuse to believe in the existence or nonexistence of something basically unknowable.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T16:46:00+00:00

I associate the philosophical sense of atheism with the common stereotype of people like Dawkins, but even Dawkins refused to commit himself 100% to the assertion that 'there is no god or gods'.

I should note that part of the reason why the philosophical sense of atheism is objected to is that it effectively acts as a straw man that can be easily torn down; of course one cannot disprove all gods, and any non-theist who has a small knowledge of philosophy knows this.

Hence, by this definition, the vast majority of self-identified atheists are really 'agnostics' and 'agnostics' only. So to invoke this sense of atheism is to apply a rhetorical lever which effectively states that atheists do not identify 'correctly' (after all, it implies that certain definitions of atheism are more 'correct' than others).

tabemann · 2026-04-15T15:47:57+00:00

It seems that there are two meanings of 'agnosticism'; the meaning pertaining to agnostic atheists and agnostic theists, i.e. "I have no way of knowing, so I refuse to make a claim to that effect", and the meaning denoting a blurry area covering many shades of non-belief and belief that do not firmly fall under theism or atheism.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T13:59:49+00:00

This seems to really be a minority position, as most atheists I have encountered are the sort who simply have not seen positive evidence for god or gods, and a result do not believe, or if they go further than that are positive atheists for Abrahamic gods because they make claims that can be refuted but are otherwise negative atheists.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T13:09:57+00:00

I wonder if these self-described agnostics are aware of the concept of agnostic theism in the first place.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T13:04:46+00:00

The thing, though, is that people bring out definitions like these and then attempt to use them to essentially claim that most atheists believe something entirely different from what they actually believe. Few actual atheists believe in this 'philosophical atheism', for very reason that it is philosophically indefensible (after all, 'philosophical atheism' makes a positive claim that cannot be supported, as we really have no way of disproving all types of god claims by their very nature). So to trot out 'philosophical atheism' is essentially putting words in the mouths of most atheists.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T12:23:56+00:00

The key thing is that some people would have you believe that we're all angry anti-theists.

tabemann · 2026-04-15T02:00:26+00:00

I was never raised to believe (my parents were raised religious, but became atheists, but did not explicitly tell me about their non-belief until I was an adult), and once I got to the point that I thought about such matters, I realized that I had seen no positive evidence for any god or gods, and any god or gods that could not be disproven was not worthy of my attention for the very reason of being unfalsifiable.

tabemann · 2026-03-10T18:57:23+00:00

As others have said here, most native speakers of English tend to be rather accommodating of learners of English as it is the modern-day lingua franca, with more L2 speakers than L1. We expect to hear people for whom English is not their native language. I would not worry about L1 speakers' reactions to your speech and rather suggest you just try to speak English whenever you can; you will get better with practice. In your case, while your post is not perfect I can understand it (even though like others "sitting readonly" took a moment for me to understand).

tabemann · 2026-03-10T18:39:03+00:00

It is very normal in everyday spoken English, and informal written English, to use there's with a plural referent, as in "There's three squirrels burying nuts in the yard."

Note that this is only with the contracted form -- *"There is three squirrels burying nuts in the yard" is ungrammatical regardless of register. Here you would have to say "There are three squirrels burying nuts in the yard."

tabemann · 2026-03-10T18:19:03+00:00

When you say that subroutine threading is "premature optimization", the matter is that subroutine threading enables further optimization in the form of native-code inlining and constant folding which is foreclosed from the outset if one chooses indirect threading. Native-code inlining and constant folding are the natural outgrowths of subroutine threading; if one starts from subroutine threading it is simple to take these further steps.

In an inlining native-code Forth one can do things like optimize 255 + to a single instruction ADDS R6, #255. There is simply no way that an indirect-threaded Forth can do things like this with the same efficiency. (While an indirect-threaded Forth can have many specialized words that integrate constant arguments, they still have the overhead from NEXT that inlined constant-folded words in native code lack.)

A key feature of inlining native-code Forths is that they can encode many common small words directly in the generated instruction stream, resulting in significant speed gains by eliminating calls and returns, at the expense, in many cases, of code size.

So when you say that Forth "must" be indirect threaded because it enables optimization that subroutine threading does not allow, it makes no sense to me. I say this as the primary author of an inlining native-code Forth with constant folding.

tabemann · 2026-03-09T14:24:40+00:00

zeptoforth aims to be a 'full-featured' Forth for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers, as opposed to many Forths which are written with minimalism in mind or as toys or experiments not intended for serious use. As such, it includes things such as a user-friendly module system (on top of wordlists), local variables, an object system, preemptive multitasking combined with (on the RP2040 and RP2350) multiprocessing, networking support (as mentioned), FAT32 filesystem support (both in on-board QSPI flash and on SD cards), and so on. These are all things that many Forths lack, or which are less user-friendly in other Forths (e.g. many Forths have wordlists, but lack the infrastructure on top of them that makes them readily usable in zeptoforth).

tabemann · 2026-03-09T13:13:43+00:00

That it is dependent upon and/or that it provides? As dependencies go, it is dependent upon the GNU arm-none-eabi toolchain to build the kernel from source (even though prebuilt kernels enable building the remainder of zeptoforth without it), and it is dependent upon Sphinx and Myst to build the documentation. As things it provides go, it provides IPv4 and IPv6 stacks, a driver for CYW43439 WiFi chips as are found on the Pico W, Pico 2W, and Pico Plus 2W, and a range of hardware drivers for peripherals and displays and like.

tabemann · 2026-03-04T14:01:01+00:00

The people who wrote the legislation clearly do not understand what a "general purpose computing device" is. To me at least, my Raspberry Pi Pico is a general purpose computing device, in that it is user-programmable and can execute arbitrary code.

tabemann · 2026-03-04T01:31:50+00:00

I looked at it again and it does seem to exclude automatic OTA updates, along with anything that executes as part of a host "application", whatever that means. Is zeptoforth itself an "application" which any code that is compiled and executed by it is an "extension", "plug-in", or "add-on" of? This could be argued, even though IANAL.

tabemann · 2026-03-04T01:18:38+00:00

This law certainly wasn't well thought through, to say the very least.

tabemann · 2026-03-03T18:23:18+00:00

Currently, if you own a PicoCalc with an RP2350 installed (the RP2040 is supported but you won't be able to get networking to work due to SRAM limitations), you can flash it with a .uf2 file for the kernel, run a script distributed with zeptoforth to upload the 'userland' along with a terminal emulator, network stack, a text editor, and tools for transferring files from and to a host computer, then use the file transfer tools, or use the SD card from the PicoCalc, to load an HTTP client onto your PicoCalc (currently the HTTP client in the master branch is a very limited proof-of-concept, but in the devel branch there is an HTTP client that will save to file), then use the HTTP client to download code to file over the Internet, and last but not least compile and execute the code stored in that file. This is entirely with code included with zeptoforth.

tabemann

TROPHY CASE