On Wed, Sep 05, 2001 at 01:26:22PM -0700, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> > I myself questioned the wisdom of using Forth at the time, and Jordan
> > simply replied I was free to find a more popular language with a freely
> > available interpreter that would fit in as small a space as FICL did.
>
> I also have to question the assertion that the community of people who
> understand or have even a passing familiarity with this sort of thing
> [a forth-based loader] is miniscule. OpenBoot, for example, is
> entirely forth-based (c.f. Mitch Bradley). Every machine Sun has ever
> shipped in any serious quantity has OpenBoot as its loader. Every
And I don't know a *single* Sun admin (current or ex) that has ever done
any OpenBoot/forth scripts. Not a *single* one. Nor does Solaris or
even your own company (Apple) try to do as much in OpenBoot as we do in
our loader. We often desire /boot/*.4th tweaks, but only 1-2 people have
enough passing knowledge of Forth to do it.
> FreeBSD is simply following an well-established trend for boot loaders
> here rather than going its own way,
Not really. You are speaking of machine firmware. OpenBoot loads the
bootblock and provides some BIOS-like services. Our bootblocks load our
FICL loader. Thus you really cannot compare the two the way you do.
> and if we were to use Ruby as our
> boot loader then I'm sure a lot of Japanese people would be very happy
> but it would also make us utterly unique, a decision of even more
> questionable wisdom.
A lot more people can tweak an existing Ruby script, than an existing
forth one.
--
-- David ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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