howerj

Yes, the foundations of the constitutions are not the same, one of them has a mostly codified constitution, the other has a mostly uncodified (uncodified but mostly written down, that is not a contradiction!) constitution. They both have constitutions however, so the phase "Britain has no constitution" is wrong. To be clear, I am not saying that is good or bad that Britain has an uncodified constitution, just that from my definition (and most political and legal definitions) of what a constitution is the phrase "Britain has no constitution" is wrong. Britain of course has laws, and laws about how new laws are made, etcetera. This forms a constitution.

I think you have diverged too much...well from reality, in order to try to prove a point. Do you think most people, or lawyers, or judges in the UK spend their time trying to enumerate all the laws of the land before they proceed in their court cases? Do you think that people think that the UK system of government is illegitimate? What point are you trying to make? Because it is not grounded in reality. You can debate the merits of a codified constitution versus an uncodified one, but the UK does have a constitution, the vast majority of which is codified into many documents. The following two links might help you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncodified_constitution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_(political_norm)#Un...

Note the second one applies to the US - a country with a mostly but not completely codified constitution.

I believe interpretation is a part of the definition of a constitution, you do not, we have different definitions, oh well. I also believe the uncodified/codified distinction is not binary, it is obvious that the US constitution is far more codified than the UK constitution, the two are at opposite extremes.

I find it weird that people would downvote this, I know you should not complain about it, but this comment is correct. The UK does have a (uncodified) constitution. Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.

The UK has an extremely entrepreneurial culture as well, which is shown in the data (number of businesses registered, number of startups, both per capita), it ranks very highly, along with other indicators of innovation, it might not be as entrepreneurial as the USA, but globally it ranks very highly. The fact that you mention the Soviet Union and its central planned economy and the (outdated and stereotyped view of the) British class system almost like they are equivalent really undermines your point as well.

Other's have mentioned that Forth isn't an esoteric language, however if you want a Forth written for an esoteric language I have written one for SUBLEQ (see https://esolangs.org/wiki/Subleq). Although SUBLEQ is more of an esoteric machine than a language, it also sort of qualifies as one (and has an entry on the esolangs Wiki).

It's available at https://howerj.github.io/subleq.htm if you want to try it online.

I have heard that this is how it is done before. I wonder how that works with a third party? If they happened to come across the binaries some how they could demand the source. I also wonder if that clause is enforceable.

Is there an implementation of an APL language (or other any other array language) written in *readable* C that is around 1000 LoC? There are for LISP, FORTH, Prolog, TCL and the like.

Ah yeah, I'm not looking for Forth work, it would be nice, but not likely. Just C/C#/.Net/Linux and Embedded work.

I had a lot of fun writing this and it is great to see this submitted here, I just did it to see what was possible. It is an incredibly niche processor with little practical use. If you have any questions let me know.

I have also started contracting in the UK and I'm looking for work, details are in my profile.

I find those Schuko / Europlugs terrible, they never fit correctly (wildly different manufacturing tolerances between countries) and break easily.

I know that's what I do! It's a fun exercise, and Forth is uniquely suited to writing Forth interpreters. Forth really only has a few areas where it excels and they are incredibly niche ones at that.

I do not know how this can be justified at all. It does not make any sense.

The full quote would be "The dmac and smac are pretty self-explanatory fields. They contain the MAC addresses of the communicating parties (destination and source, respectively).", it does explain them. However, this is an article about how to make a network stack, it is safe to assume the reader should know something about networking before hand.

As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically.

See:

https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-yea...

which is a source that is not going to be biased towards Brexit success, and instead against it (not that there was any success in it, but still).

Here's a Forth that runs on SUBLEQ https://github.com/howerj/subleq, there's also a file system for it https://github.com/howerj/ffs.

Here's a 16-bit bit-serial computer I made and tested on an FGPA https://github.com/howerj/bit-serial. If you look at `bit.c` it looks like an ordinary 16-bit Accumulator based Virtual Machine with a few odd instructions that make more sense when you know how a bit serial CPU works, nothing special about it. However the VHDL in `bit.vhd` shows how all those instructions are processed in a bit serial fashion, how data is fetched and stored in shift registers, etcetera.

The bit serial CPU in `bit.vhd` is actually customizable, you can make a 32-bit, a 14-bit, or a 27-bit CPU if you want from that VHDL quite easily.

Same with Natwest / Virgin. I do not think I have ever verified anything with SMS banking wise, sometimes you get alerts via SMS though.

You keep deliberately conflating energy and electricity. Importing energy and electricity is not the same thing. The UK cannot source its energy requirements locally but it can source electricity by importing energy and converting it to electricity.

Where we import from matters, importing from France and the Nordic countries is far more viable and easily defensible than importing from Morocco. It is still not a great idea to rely on them.

I agree that renewable generation being more distributed is harder to destroy than oil infrastructure (not that anyone has the operational capacity to attack the UKs infrastructure barring the USA with any great success) but that is not what it is a risk - the HVDC lines are! They are much easier to take out. If renewables require a HVDCs to less stable and friendly areas of the world then they make the UK more vulnerable - it is dumb.

> We might as well sell off our armed forces.

I don't see how this is relevant outside of the UK's desire to defend its foreign energy interests / trade, which it very obviously cant do anyways.

That's hyperbole, selling off our armed forces is a naive move that no nation would rationally do, as is becoming so incredibly dependent on a chain of other countries for electricity generation.

I prefer a solution that does not involve rationing electricity.

The comment is harsh, but it is not fair. Nor is (most of it) relevant and it even contradicts itself in places. It is a list of hot takes designed to anger and provoke instead of elucidate anything as I have said something they do not like.

Energy security is something every country should aim for, regardless of the size or perceived importance of the country.

I already know this, it doesn't change anything. Who is able to blockade the UK's access to oil, gas or uranium, all of which are much easier to stockpile than electricity? The only one with that capability is the USA. Who is able to attack a HVDC line? Anyone with a fifth rate navy.

I find that fact that the UK would depend on another country for power generation in a serious way really really dumb. There is no other way of putting it. If we did that we might as well sell off our armed forces and declare global peace unilaterally, that is how naive that option is. It would make the UK, or any country that did that, incredibly vulnerable. We cannot ever lose power.

Except that is not true, it is sometimes convenient, and sometimes very inconvenient and not wanted. My reasoning for file systems that are case sensitive is the following:

1. Some people want file systems to case sensitive. 2. Case sensitive is easier to implement. This is very much not a trivial thing. Case insensitivity only really makes sense for ASCII.

In the camp of wanting case insensitivity:

1. Some people want file systems to be case insensitive.

There is more in favor of case sensitivity.

I was about to say the same thing, Apple have too much capital and they do not know what to do with it. It would be better to give it back to their investors instead of...this.

Does anyone know how much memory is available on board to each design for the tiny tapeout project? If each project could include something like a FPGA Block RAM I feel the project would have (much greater) utility and flexibility. Although I understand that might not be possible.

I found out about Dark Star from the album "Trevor Something Does Not Exist" (https://youtu.be/LYOtZvwNCsc?feature=shared&t=2942), it uses the conversation with the bomb as part of music, which contains spoilers!

Thanks! You should still be able buy it, you might have to either click on "Paperback" or "Hardcover", if you want to get the kindle edition you have to go to the Amazon webpage that serves you country (e.g. if you are in the UK and you are on amazon.com you get "This title is not currently available for purchase", but if you go to amazon.co.uk, you get buy it). That's an odd user interface issue...

I am not sure what you mean by concurrent in this case, muxleq is just subleq with one extra instruction. The extra instruction is based off of multiplexing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplexer). Subleq as you know is incredibly inefficient, muxleq is an experiment to add a single instruction to Subleq in order to greatly improve its efficiency.

The `mux` instruction added computes:

   m[operand2] = (m[operand1] & ~selector) | (m[operand2] & selector)

Yeah, it really is a pain to do anything in it. I got around that by writing in another language instead as soon as possible. You can paper over many issues with a VM, although it will slow things down on such limited computers.

I wrote a Forth interpreter for a SUBLEQ machine (https://github.com/howerj/subleq), and for a bit-serial machine (https://github.com/howerj/bit-serial), both of which do not have a function call stack which is a requirement of Forth. SUBLEQ also does not allow indirect loading and stores as well and requires self-modifying code to do anything non-trivial. The approach I took for both machines was to build a virtual machine that could do those things, along with cooperative multithreading. The heap, if required, is written in Forth, along with a floating point word-set (various MCUs not having instructions for floating point numbers is still fairly common, and can be implemented as calls to software functions that implement them instead).

I would imagine that other compilers took a similar approach which wasn't mentioned.

EDIT: There were some BASIC interpreters which did this as well, implementing a VM and then targetting that instead. P-Code is a similar thing.