Editors for Forth or/and Tayon?!
Christof Eb.
Posts: 1,197
in Propeller 2
Hi,
perhaps two "discoveries" might be helpful or interesting for others about editors for forth:
1. "winedit" by Tom Zimmer for win32forth is running on windows. It can do code coloring and and it has a very interesting feature regarding documentation: It can scan a folder and all forth files in its subdirectories. There it will find all definitions of colon definitions, variables, values , constants.
If you position your cursor in your new forth file on a word and press F9, the hypertext-editor will open the file containing the definition of the word and show it. F10 - and you are back to your new file. Crtl-F1 will show the definitions of ansi94 standard words.
I found it working fine with win10 64 bit, if the editor and the color definition file is inside the same folder as the source files and winforth is inside C:\win32forth
https://github.com/zuloloxi/Win32Forth6v05H.
2. There has been some discussion about having a standalone system with P2. "LF" is an editor written in forth (ansi94) for sequential files (not block files), that is quite usable. I was able to get it running on my little forth system and I am quite sure, that it it would not be too difficult to bring it to life with tachyon.
http://www.murphywong.net/hello/lf.htm
Merry Christmas! Christof
perhaps two "discoveries" might be helpful or interesting for others about editors for forth:
1. "winedit" by Tom Zimmer for win32forth is running on windows. It can do code coloring and and it has a very interesting feature regarding documentation: It can scan a folder and all forth files in its subdirectories. There it will find all definitions of colon definitions, variables, values , constants.
If you position your cursor in your new forth file on a word and press F9, the hypertext-editor will open the file containing the definition of the word and show it. F10 - and you are back to your new file. Crtl-F1 will show the definitions of ansi94 standard words.
I found it working fine with win10 64 bit, if the editor and the color definition file is inside the same folder as the source files and winforth is inside C:\win32forth
https://github.com/zuloloxi/Win32Forth6v05H.
2. There has been some discussion about having a standalone system with P2. "LF" is an editor written in forth (ansi94) for sequential files (not block files), that is quite usable. I was able to get it running on my little forth system and I am quite sure, that it it would not be too difficult to bring it to life with tachyon.
http://www.murphywong.net/hello/lf.htm
Merry Christmas! Christof
Comments
On the other hand, this "automatic hypertext" feature of winedit is really quite helpful, if you have written already a bunch of words some time ago and need to have their precise parameters and their order.
It is quite nice as well, if you have not written a program yourself, because you can try to understand it going top down.
Sometimes forth code can be hard to read, because you cannot easily see the parameters or even their number, that are passed to a word.
The hypertext feature can be some kind of substitute for documentation, gained effortless.
As far as I understand, Tom Zimmer wrote this feature working on a job, when they had to do maintenance of code, others had written.
The editor was already part of f-pc, which I have tried via dosbox.
Win32Forth (and winedit) had been written not as a hobby project but to earn money using it as tools. I like the powerful debugger of of f-pc and win32forth too.
I think it is kind of a strange pity, that people have discussed a lot about having a self hosting system and tacos forth is already there lying in the shadow. (I have not tried it yet, because I still don't have a P2.)
TAOQZ ROM fits into 12k and still includes support for smartpins, SD and FAT32, and Flash etc. If the ROM were 32k instead of 16k it would have been possible at the time to include a full stand-alone system that supported graphics and keyboards etc. A 64k ROM would have been the "ant's pants" with assembler and editor etc and possibly even a Spin2 compiler. But it is also easy enough to load this stuff into Flash/SD anyway, although despite the binaries that have been made available nobody really does. TAQOZ includes all the stuff for backing up and autorun so making a turn-key app is super simple.