Why Floating Point?

Forth systems traditionally make use of cooperative multitasking. It is very simple and clever. But it has its limits. If you write all your software by yourself, each software part can be cooperative. But if you want to benefit from middleware written by somebody else (and most probably not written in Forth), you can be sure that software is not cooperative (in the context of multitasking). Forth wants to rule your system. I would like to have a Forth system that is cooperative. It should extend the system, to make it interactive and easy to use.

The Forth interpreter (called terminal task in Forth jargon) itself is only a thread and can be used as some sort of CLI for testing purposes or could be the main part of the application.

Forth Multitasking

Andrew Haley wrote "Forth has been multi-tasking for almost 50 years. It's time to standardize it" and he is right. I will implement his proposed API for Mecrisp-Cube described in A multi-tasking wordset for Standard Forth. The multitasker wordset is very similar to the one in SwiftForth / PolyForth.

I use the term task here because it is well known in the Forth world, although Mecrisp-Cube make use of threads. Mecrisp-Cube tasks are CMSIS-RTOS threads with user variables. The Mecrisp-Cube (CMSIS-RTOS / FreeRTOS) scheduler is pre-emptive and not round robin (cooperative). Mecrisp-Cube is always multi tasked, you can not switch off the scheduler and therefore there is no MULTI, SINGLE, or INIT-MULTI.