NetBSD 10.x Kernel Math_emulation

NetBSD 10.x Kernel Math_emulation
mezzantrop.wordpress.com

I once made an image of a hard disk so old it wouldn't work on anything newer than a Pentium. I plugged in a USB PCI card+USB stick and booted a modern-ish at the time Debian Live CD.

It took over 5 minutes to decompress just the kernel and a hour to copy the HDD to the USB stick, but it did work. The time delta between the oldest and newest component on that system was well over 20 years, sometimes this is what you have to do with what you have on hand.

I don't care about Rust and it's killer app Firefox, there are tons of alternatives for i686. From Luakit to Vimb.

Forth implementation in Eforth it's like this:

    ( FORTH-83 FLOATING POINT.
      ----------------------------------
      COPYRIGHT 1985 BY ROBERT F. ILLYES
            PO BOX 2516, STA. A
            CHAMPAIGN, IL 61820
            PHONE: 217/826-2734  )     HEX
    : ZERO  OVER 0= IF DROP 0 THEN ;
    : FNEGATE 8000 XOR ZERO ;
    : FABS  7FFF AND ;
    : NORM  >R 2DUP OR
            IF BEGIN DUP 0 1- >R
               REPEAT SWAP 0 ELSE 8000 R> 1+ THEN
            ELSE R> DROP THEN ;
    : F2*   1+ ZERO ;
    : F*    ROT + 4000 - >R UM* R> NORM ;
    : FSQ   2DUP F* ;
    : F2/   1- ZERO ;
    : UM/   DUP >R UM/MOD SWAP R>
            OVER 2* 1+ UR
            0 ROT ROT 2DUP U ZERO
            ELSE >R D2/ FABS R> UM/ R> 1+
            THEN ;
    : ALIGN 20 MIN 0 DO D2/ LOOP ;
    : RALIGN 1- ?DUP IF ALIGN THEN
            1 0 D+ D2/ ;
    : FSIGN FABS OVER 0R DNEGATE R>
            8000 OR THEN ;
    : F+    ROT 2DUP >R >R FABS SWAP FABS -
            DUP IF DUP 0 R> SWAP >R >R
                    THEN 0 SWAP RALIGN
            THEN SWAP 0 R> R@ XOR 0 FSIGN ROT SWAP NORM
            ELSE D+ IF 1+ 2/ 8000 OR R> 1+
                    ELSE R> THEN THEN ;
    : F-    FNEGATE F+ ;
    : FR PL @ TENS DROP UM* R> SHIFTS
            RALIGN PL @ ?DUP IF 0 DO # LOOP
            ". HOLD THEN #S ROT SIGN ;
    : TUCK  SWAP OVER ;
    : F.    TUCK  TYPE SPACE ;
    : DFLOAT 4020 FSIGN NORM ;
    : F     DFLOAT POINT TENS DFLOAT F/ ;
    : FCONSTANT F 2CONSTANT ;
    : FLOAT DUP 0R FLOAT F-
            F2* X2 2OVER FSQ X3 F+ F/
            2OVER F2/ F-     X1 F+ F/
            ONE F+ FSQ R> + ;
    : FEXP  X4 F* EXP ;
    : GET   BL WORD DUP 1+ C@ "- = TUCK -
            0 0 ROT CONVERT DROP -+ ;
    : E     F GET >R R@ ABS 13301 4004 */MOD
            >R FLOAT 4004 FLOAT F/ EXP R> +
            R> 0R
            FLOAT 4004 FLOAT F/ EXP F*
            2DUP ONE F 1- >R THEN
             SIGN 2DROP
            "E HOLD F# #>     TYPE SPACE ;

On the lack of floating point on some arch, Forth itself (even ANS Forth) encourages you to follow a fixed point philosophy unless it's absolutely neccesary, because you can always scale up the magnitudes on big 32 bit machines.

And Pi can be prise enough by using scaling with 'double' (for 16 bit machines) numbers:

100.000 355 113 m*/ d. 314159 ok

Kudos to the author for doing this _and_ sharing it with the world.