EuroForth 2020

Invitation section

Please note the COVID 19 / Coronavirus information below

Online, 4.-6. September 2020

The 36th EuroForth conference takes place in the Internet.

Please see the official call for papers for instructions on how to submit papers.

The Internet

The Internet / CC BY-SA 2.0 Gerald Wodni (In case you do not get the reference: IT Crowd snippet)

The conference will be preceded by the Forth standards meeting which starts on September, 1st.

Both, meeting and conference will be hosted in the Internet.

Programme

Please Note: Times are subject to change, we are working on the online schedule.

Hardware requirements

The following hardware is required:

You cannot attend the conference with a built-in microphone. If you cannot get a headset and cause interference, you will be muted and will be limited to replying by text.

The following hardware is strongly recommended:

If there is a wall behind your monitor consider bouncing light of it with a lamp, so we can see your lovely face. Alternatively shine light onto you from an angle.

Software requirements

TL;DR: get Firefox, sign up at the link you will be getting via email on the 27th August.

The following software is required:

The following software is strongly recommended as a fallback option:

We will be using the web-based chat-application Mattermost - no installation required, hosted by Forth Committee Members to help privacy concerns. You will receive a signup link after the registration closes. All communication is within this chat-application, we ask you to sign in within the Get together timeframe.

For the video conferences themselfes we will be using BigBlueButton hosted by senfcall.de. Links to the conference rooms will be provided in chat-application Mattermost. As this EuroForth is free of charge, we ask you to consider donating to senfcall after the conference.

If this should fail we will fall back to Zoom. Consider installing their client beforehand.

Thanks to everybody who has been testing these systems with us, we are not considering any more alternatives at this time.

Forth standard meeting (draft agenda - in the making)

Tuesday, 1st September (UTC+0)

Wednesday, 2nd September (UTC+0)

Thursday, 3rd September (UTC+0)

EuroForth conference

on air ... these session are streamed live on twitch, recorded and shared on youtube for future generations to enjoy and to rewatch

Friday, 4th September UTC(+0)

Saturday, 6th September UTC(+0)

Sunday, 6th September UTC(+0)

Timezones

For your convenience the starting times converted to your location, see Timezone calculator for more.

UTC                    13:00 UTC
Los Angeles            06:00 PDT
New York               09:00 EDT
London                 14:00 BST
Vienna, Berlin, Rome   15:00 CEST
Cape Town              15:00 SAST
Hongkong               21:00 HKT
Tokio                  22:00 JST

COVID 19 / Coronavirus

As with so many events this year EuroForth also has to take tha pandemic into consideration.

Registration process

The following procedure is very different from previous years, please bear with us.

  1. Please register if you want to attend., also if you do not know yet if you will be able to attend. Registrations this year are not binding until the prepayment has been received, see below.
  2. The decision for Rome/Online has been announced:
    • As Online was decided, the conference and the standards meeting will be held online, on the same dates.

Registration opens on 15th May

Program section

Program

Online, 4.-6. September 2020

Online registration is closed. If you are late to the party but want to participate, please drop me an email at gerald dot wodni on gmail, and I'll sign you up.

Forth standard meeting agenda

Please ignore this section if you only attend EuroForth

Tuesday, 1st September (UTC+0)

Wednesday, 2nd September (UTC+0)

Thursday, 3rd September (UTC+0)

EuroForth conference

on air ... these session are streamed live on twitch, recorded and shared on youtube for future generations to enjoy and to rewatch

Note: Presentation-to-session assignment in progress, let me know if you are desperately unhappy in Mattermost ;)

Format: ([lenth]min/[presentation no])

Friday, 4th September UTC(+0)

Saturday, 6th September UTC(+0)

Sunday, 6th September UTC(+0)

Timezones

For your convenience the starting times converted to your location, see Timezone calculator for more.

Timezone               EuroForth    Forth200x
----------------------------------------------
UTC                    13:00 UTC    12:00 UTC
Los Angeles            06:00 PDT    05:00 PDT
New York               09:00 EDT    08:00 EDT
London                 14:00 BST    13:00 BST
Vienna, Berlin, Rome   15:00 CEST   14:00 CEST
Cape Town              15:00 SAST   14:00 SAST
Hongkong               21:00 HKT    20:00 HKT
Tokio                  22:00 JST    21:00 JST

Hardware requirements

The following hardware is required:

You cannot attend the conference with a built-in microphone. If you cannot get a headset and cause interference, you will be muted and will be limited to replying by text.

The following hardware is strongly recommended:

If there is a wall behind your monitor consider bouncing light of it with a lamp, so we can see your lovely face. Alternatively shine light onto you from an angle.

Software requirements

TL;DR: get Firefox, sign up at the link you will be getting via email on the 27th August.

The following software is required:

The following software is strongly recommended as a fallback option:

We will be using the web-based chat-application Mattermost - no installation required, hosted by Forth Committee Members to help privacy concerns. You will receive a signup link after the registration closes. All communication is within this chat-application, we ask you to sign in within the Get together timeframe.

For the video conferences themselfes we will be using BigBlueButton hosted by senfcall.de. Links to the conference rooms will be provided in chat-application Mattermost. As this EuroForth is free of charge, we ask you to consider donating to senfcall after the conference.

If this should fail we will fall back to Zoom. Consider installing their client beforehand.

Thanks to everybody who has been testing these systems with us, we are not considering any more alternatives at this time.

Conference Proceedings

Proceedings: http://www.euroforth.org/ef20/papers/
Videos: https://wiki.forth-ev.de/doku.php/events:ef2020:start
CfP: http://www.euroforth.org/ef20/cfp.html

Presentation section

Presentations

  1. A: Integrating wordlists and regognizers / B: Forth IDEs (30/30) - Anton Ertl

    The search order and the recognizer stack are similar concepts. Can we unify them. We finally found a way to do it by turning wordlists into recognizers.

  2. Social distancing with net2o: Plans and progress on video conferencing (45) - Bernd Paysan

    Video conferencing systems have (little surprise) the same privacy problems as any other Internet product. During the pandemics 2020, my motivation to solve this part of the problem was boosted. Peer 2 peer protocols do well on sharing complete files, but sharing real-time streams is a challenge. Fortunately, a solvable.

  3. VFX UI5 - Welcome to the Cluster (30) - Gerald Wodni

    Get your Machine 2 Machine(M2M) communication needs and corresponding User Interface(UI) online in minutes. After our first Demo of UI5 last year we are releasing it for wider testing. Not only can you run it on your local machine, but create a new instance with a mere click in the cluster (not the cloud ;) )

  4. microCore Overview (45 Min) - Klaus Schleisiek

    microCore's characteristics from a computer science point of view

  5. A: Extending the VALUE concept / B&C: Short talks (30) - Nick Nelson

    B: Short talk 1 "Preparing for 64 bit Forth"

    C: Short talk 2 " A radical Forth alternative to the Windows registry"

  6. cc64 - a Small C compiler written in Forth (30min) - Philip Zembrod

    I have recently joined Carsten Strotmann in the effort to renovate the VolksForth code base; my focus so far is the C64/C16 implementation. I had used VolksForth aka UltraForth ~25-30 years ago to implement a Small C compiler on the C64, targeting 6502 systems. Last year I have picked up that project again and open-sourced it (https://github.com/pzembrod/cc64) - this is what re-kindled my interest in Forth.

    In this talk I want to show some aspects of cc64, reasons for and advantages of writing it in Forth, some design details, a few challenges I faced, and the benefits of migrating to emulators.

  7. A: VFX Forth 64 for MacOS and Linux / B: Experience with dual words and recognisers (30/30) - Stephen Pelc

    A: VFX Forth v5.1 has been converted to native 64 bit operation for x64/x86_64/AMD64 CPUs. The Mac and Linux versions are available and the Windows version follows. The MPE cross compilers are also available on 64 bit hosts. I will discuss the horrors of a 64 bit instruction set grafted onto an instruction set that is nearly 50 years old. The impact of converting the existing 20 year old code base is also discussed.

    B: The VFX Forthv5.1 kernel incorporates dual-behaviour words and recognisers. This talk discusses our experience over the last year with these changes. Dual-behaviour words are a standards-compliant solution to needing words that have separate interpretation and compilation behaviour. Previous papers called these words NDCS words (non-default compilation semantics). Recognisers are a fashionable solution to providing a user-extensible text interpreter. Our experience converting two OOP packages to use recognisers is discussed.

  8. Through the Looking-Glass - Augmenting seedForth for Better Insight (45 min) - Ulrich Hoffmann

    In order to build high quality applications we need to understand the underlying systems. Programmers often inspect key parameters to get insight into their applications' and the underlying systems' working during development and debugging. Forth's interactive nature, usually used ad hoc, is of great help here. We would like to propose and demonstrate how to systematically enhance application programs so they provide better insight into their problem domain. Development environments such as seedForth can be augmented accordingly to support this development style.

  9. Smart Stacks in VHDL (30) - Andrew Read

    This work originates from our development of seedbed, a minimal VHDL implementation of the seedForth target. A softcore stack processor needs hardware implementations of stacks. Smart Stacks are an approach based on abstracted stack operations rather than register level control . An innovation of smart stacks is that they offer built-in exception handling.

  10. Learning Forth with Exercsim.io (20) - Carsten Strotmann

    Excercism.io is a learning platform for programming languages. It was created and is maintained by Github staff and contributors.

    Exercism is free to use, offers exercises in 51 languages and soon will have a Forth language tack.

    This talk will present the Exercism system, give information on the planned content and will ask for participation.

  11. A: Exploring The Wonders of D-Charts / B: Forth In China 1984 (30/30) - Bill Ragsdale