Anyone here using Forth?

tperkins

Hello,

I'm new to the forum and just ran a search with the keyword "Forth" The search came up empty.

Is anyone here using Forth or Gforth?

Thanks, Tom Perkins
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria

Paul Baker

I am not using it, but I have written forth interpretor for the SX, it is roughly 90% complete, its an abandoned project (got distracted, it was a learning exercise for the SX architecture). The remaining stuff to do is implementing the program flow instructions in forth plus a few loose ends. If your interested I can provide you the code and guide you on completion of the project as long as you don't have commercial aspirations for the product and provide appropriate credit to me as the lead author of the code.

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Jon Williams

These guys claim to have a 70 MHz SX on their module and the ability to program it in Forth: wwwloraxworks.com

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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax

kjennejohn

I checked this site out. Half is under construction, none of the products are available yet. They have a dictionary of FORTH terms, if you're interested. It's under 'support'. I'd say check back in a month.

Later!

kenjj

Jon Williams

I think I'll stick with SX/B.

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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax

tperkins

Hello Jon, kjennejohn, and Paul,

Thank you for your kind replies.

kjennejohn, I will look at that site every so often.

Jon, after getting the SX Key & #52 development board, I'll have a chance to play with SX/B thoroughly, it may well be what I need.

Paul, your reply was quite interesting. However, do I correctly take your restriction to mean that no firmware generated in association with your interpreter could be used in a for-profit venture? Or only that, once released, a version of your interpeter itself must be a) shareware or b ) freeware?

Thank you, Tom Perkins
molon labe
montani semper liberi
para fides paternae patria

Jon Williams

Don't get me wrong, I'm actually quite fascinated by Forth -- I just can't seem to get my head around using it for something practical. I think it would be kind of neat if Paul finished and released his Forth interpreter; who knows, at some point I might just "get it."

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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax

Paul Baker

Ill try to be more explicit. You cannot use my code to come out with a Forth interpretor for sale without setting up a royalty schedule. However I have no problems with you using it to generate firmware within an application, an end program in a commercial application is fine, no royalties. But a commercial venture to provide the capability of others to create Forth programs would require some negotiations.

Now with that said, this is very much a work in progress. There is one crucial portion missing which would be nessesary to produce a viable Forth engine, and thats the compiler. Right now in order to create a Forth program, you must hand tokenize the commands according to the token table and place those tokens in a data table in the SX's memory. I understand this makes the process tedious at best.·The·compiler would be a PC resident program which would tokenize the Forth code and spit out a program with the token code and the interpretor. I originally envisioned the compiler would dynamically create a token map according to the actual Forth code and incorporate only those Forth commands used by the program, allowing maximization of the·token space for user programs.

You are welcome to peruse my code and decide if you want to run with it, I can lend my advice on interpretation of the code within the interpretor and verbal·help with creation of a compiler, free of charge. If you decide to use the code, want a compiler, and don't want to write it yourself, we can enter negotiations on cost of me developing the compiler and IP issues on the compiler and interpretor (whether you want control of the rites to both, or not).

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·1+1=10