On 10/07/2018 19:49, gnuarm.deletethisbit@gmail.com wrote:
> On Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 10:36:59 AM UTC-4, Gareth's Downstairs Computer
wrote:
>> On 10/07/2018 15:30, Mark Wills wrote:
>>> On Tuesday, 10 July 2018 15:24:48 UTC+1, Gareth's Downstairs Computer 
wrote:
>>>> With oodles (Soon to be tera-oodles?) of RAM available
>>>> on the RPi3, and in future releases likely to be even more,
>>>> is there any point to continuing to cater for bytes, halfwords
>>>> and words, when everything, including CHAR, can be a 64 bit
>>>> quantity?
>>>
>>> Yes. Portability.
>>
>> I see no difficulty in porting to other 64 bit systems
>
> Virtually all machines currently in significant use address characters of 8
bits (bytes).
>  So what advantage is obtained by ignoring byte addressing instructions when
designing a Forth language?

The idea came from Adm Fisher's Dreadnought from about 1901.

Up to that time, before the onset of radar some 40 years later, with
battleships sporting several sizes of guns, it was difficult to
assess the effectiveness of gunnery because all the shell splashes
looked the same.

Fisher's brilliant idea was to equip with only 12" guns.

So. a 64 bit machine sporting only 64 bit data.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05