FORTH.

For discussions about programming, programming questions/advice, and projects that don't really have anything to do with Puppy.
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Wally
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FORTH.

#1 Post by Wally »

Thanks,

I'm interested in Forth programming, does anyone
have an implementation for forth? (or any general tips)

There is a 'bigForth' here, but the links are dead..

thanks
Wally

nooby
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#2 Post by nooby »

Would it help to go here?
http://bigforth.sourceforge.net/

that would be no pet but you would have the original to make a pet out of it with help by those that can instruct you to make a pet?
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Lobster
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#3 Post by Lobster »

Links dead but old anyway. Would need recompiling.
We used to have Forth in the devx from what I remember?
Probably not any more?

learning forth
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 774#366774
Last edited by Lobster on Sun 12 Jun 2011, 06:21, edited 1 time in total.
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#4 Post by JaDy »

Years ago, I wrote a FORTH interpreter in JavaScript for learning and experimenting and hope to get back to developing it further when other duties allow.

http://www.freeveda.org/forth/index.htm
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#5 Post by muggins »

@Wally,

check the bigforth thread here, as I've uploaded the last debian release.

Also, if you google linux forth, you'll find plenty of commandline versions, most of which will run in puppy. The only other version, AFAIK, with a gui interface, is reva forth.

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thanks a million, Muggins

#6 Post by Wally »

this was much appreciated.

btw, do you have any pointers for a Forth newbie?

I just ordered Starting Forth, by Leo Brodie, it looks good.

thx
Wally

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#7 Post by muggins »

Hello Wally,

I'm curious as to what you want to do with forth? I never really did much more than really simple stuff with forth, quite awhile ago, so can't really help you with any programming ideas. Besides starting forth, the author's thinking forthis available at sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/thinkin ... f/download

These might also be of interest:

http://www.mpeforth.com/arena/ProgramForth.pdf
ftp://ftp.taygeta.com/pub/Forth/Literature/fprimer.zip
ftp://ftp.taygeta.com/pub/Forth/Literature/rtf5pps.zip
http://www.figuk.plus.com/articles/pb/fighard1.htm

A list of unix/linux forths:

http://www.forthfreak.net/index.cgi?UnixLinuxForth

Lastly, there's the forth google group:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.forth/topics

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#8 Post by nooby »

Edit after reading Bernie below my post.
Wally read what Bernie write below :) He knows it better than what I do.

I could not do coding but I did play with Forth way back in 1989 or so and have first experience of how fast and small the Compiled code was on MsDOS or on Win 3.3

Very few seems to care about Forth today so the best chance is to find them on their forums and see what them are up to doing now.

Bernie cool that you cared about Forth and that Knoppix has Forth in the repo?
Last edited by nooby on Mon 13 Jun 2011, 06:28, edited 1 time in total.
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#9 Post by Wally »

thanks, Nooby.

well i know that Forth is unique among the languages. (it is user-extensible, it is real time and the compiler environment is multi tasking) can be an OS and a language.

it is small and fast like Puppy.

more Puppies should like it

thanks, Muggins, i am liking Forth for these reasons.

it was used in Spacelab.

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#10 Post by Bernie_by_the_Sea »

Forth has always been my favorite computer language. I started with the public domain figForth version for the C64 and continued with the FIG version on Intel 86 processors. I taught Forth in community college night classes for three years in the late 80‘s. I had to blackmail them a bit to get to teach it. As a lawyer I was teaching an extremely popular informal logic night course and I threatened to quit if they didn’t let me teach Forth. The computer science people opposed the idea since I had no formal computer training and since COBOL was the biggie with immediate application in business. They were still teaching Fortran too. I won since night classes weren’t considered all that academic back then. Most evening students were adults and they offered classes in quilting and square dancing.

I used Brodie's Starting Forth as a text. I had to use a public domain/open source version on college machines so I used figForth. Some students had difficulty with Brodie’s book as a text since the version of Forth in Brodie’s book differed sufficiently from the FIG version to cause confusion.

A Forth interpreter is primarily for debugging. Nearly all working Forth programs are compiled. Forth is much faster than C++ products and much smaller in size. Forth will beat anything but directly assembled machine language in speed and size and sometimes it even beats that. Forth is still used in the higher end HP calculators. It’s widely used by NASA in satellites and probes and is used by the Defense Department in a number of projects. It excels at calculation. One of its first uses in the real world was to control the positioning of large telescopes.

In the 80‘s I used Forth primarily to write graphic arcade games, mostly space shoot-em-ups like clones of Galaga and Asteroids that are mostly calculation anyway. It’s much easier and faster to program in Forth than assembler. I just returned to Linux after several years of only occasionally playing with Linux as a curiosity. Right now I’m using bigForth 2.4.0 in Knoppix (installed via the deb package). That dragon does give me an idea for a new game.

I’ve had no time to do much computer playing lately. My wife decided to put off our summer move to Maine and had both cataract and knee surgery the same week. The wildfires in Arizona are getting close to our winter home. There’s not much I can do about that but several people out there want to talk (and talk and talk) to me about the situation. We own that place strictly for the pine forest and if that goes the land will be worthless.
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#11 Post by Wally »

Sorry to hear about your worries.

Forth is really cool. It seems to be an unknown underdog in the computer world, albeit somewhat superior.

what dragon are you talking about? and what can you tell me about HP calcs and forth?

:D

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#12 Post by nooby »

Right now I’m using bigForth 2.4.0 in Knoppix (installed via the deb package). That dragon does give me an idea for a new game.
Which Dragon?

1. bigForth 2.4.0
2. Knoppix
3. installed via the deb package

I vote for that the deb package of Knoppix is the Dragon.

Am I right? :)

Ooops it may be the Wildfire though. How does one make a game out of a wildfire?
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#13 Post by Bernie_by_the_Sea »

nooby wrote:Bernie cool that you cared about Forth and that Knoppix has Forth in the repo?
Gforth, PForth and yForth are in the Debian repositories used by synaptic package manager in Knoppix DVD. However, bigFORTH is not. I downloaded it here:

http://download.polytechnic.edu.na/pub4 ... 0_i386.deb

Most versions of Linux Forth are written mostly or entirely in C and aren’t as good or as fast as bigFORTH which is written in Forth. A GUI for Forth really doesn’t help all that much at least it doesn’t me. I think a person might learn Forth faster using the command line version of bigFORTH. I don't know how the Puppy pet is set up but in Knoppix/Debian bigforth starts the command line and xbigforth runs the Minos GUI.

If you know reverse Polish notation and know how a stack works then you already know the hard part of Forth. Those are the trouble spots for beginners.
Wally wrote:what dragon are you talking about? and what can you tell me about HP calcs and forth?
There's a Forth demo with an animated dragon under "File" in Minos. I think all the HP calcs using reverse Polish run Forth.
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#14 Post by muggins »

Knoppix/Debian bigforth starts the command line and xbigforth runs the Minos GUI.
I packaged the debian bigforth to run xbigforth from the menu. I agree, with Bernie, that forth is best learnt from commandline, which is available if you run bigforth in a console....type the command words to see available dictionary.

Dragon is a gui app, in xbigforth menu....File>Dragon...but for it to run you need a working openGL graphics environment.

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#15 Post by Wally »

by the way,

this bigforth seems to be buggy.

it runs much better from the command line, per suggested.

cool dragon, though!

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gFORTH pet

#16 Post by vtpup »

I just compiled gFORTH on Racy53 and am attaching a .pet here.

To run after installation, open a terminal window and type "gforth".

To leave type "bye"

To test type:

Code: Select all

 5 5 + .
That should print a 10 on the terminal.

It puts the two numbers 5 and 5 on the stack, performs an addition, and then pops the result off and prints it on-screen.

To learn FIRTH go here and read this online book (Starting FORTH by Leo Brady):

http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf1/sf1.html
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nooby
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#17 Post by nooby »

Is this a good link to GForth?
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~forth/gf ... .html#TOC5

I am so bad at reading text so I get unsure of
if GForth is just an interpreter or if it produce standalone
programs that are executable? Or does it have to have GForth
running as an Interpreter all the time.

I fail to remember name but around 1990 or so there where
a Forth for Dos that compiled DOS executable standalone programs.

Very handy using that one. Big difference in how slow
and big an interpreter program is and running the free standing executables.

I get curious on what the name of that Forth could have been.
Existed on CD from a big known American University. UCLA?
or similar
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