05:28 <proteusguy> EuroFORTH and Silicon Valley Forth Group are still ongoing. I saw Rodriguez was one of the people reviewing papers for the last EuroFORTH.

05:35 <proteusguy> You can find their sessions on Youtube. Some are quite good.

10:03 <veltas> On comp.lang.forth someone was asking what the point of M*/ is

10:04 <veltas> It seems obvious to me, it's your typical accurate multiply-divide for doing fixed point calculations

10:05 <veltas> I've got a double, I want to scale it up by 50%, I can do 3 2 M*/

10:06 <veltas> Just a super simple example, accuracy is not needed in that calculation, but it effectively lets you multiply by a fraction accurately, very handy

10:07 <dave0> double numbers are a nice feature :-)

10:07 <veltas> According to Anton Ertl it's "pretty special purpose" and his source is that GForth doesn't use it anywhere

10:08 <veltas> But I wouldn't expect a forth environment to use it much, it's clearly more oriented towards applications

10:10 <veltas> I've been thinking about how to do spreadsheet work in forth easily, and M*/ became almost immediately relevant because in spreadsheet work you're going to want to store everything as either double fixed point numbers or floating point numbers

10:35 <veltas> I've gone to the effort of making a google account so I can reply to the thread