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"Starting FORTH" now available online

Posted: Sat 28 Nov 2009, 22:27
by vtpup
I just discovered that Leo Brodie's Starting FORTH, one of the great language tutorials from the early eighties is now available online.

http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf1/sf1.html

I remember the excitement of reading half this book on a long bus ride. FORTH was a lot of fun back in the Z80 days (6502 for others). I keep wondering if there is something I need in FORTH that would allow me to use it again!

For those interested, there are a couple of good looking FORTH's mentioned elsewhere in the Puppy forum, and locatable via scroogle, BigFORTH and Reva are the ones I'd like to try.

My problem is trying to think what to do with it.

Posted: Sun 29 Nov 2009, 06:42
by Lobster
Vtpup that is a great tutorial.
Perhaps a program to test opening times/running times for Puppy programs? For example running times to do various searches.
You might also write an example/tutorial of linking compiled Forth to GTKdialog3 or to Glade (in the devx). :)

or . . . you might try a modern language :wink:
http://bkhome.org/genie/index.html

Posted: Fri 19 Feb 2010, 13:32
by nooby
---yeah I know the thread is a bit old but there are so few thinking Forth that it is better to post in this thread.

Yes I had that book and loved to think me some day get to be able to make use of it.

I was too optimistic. But it was the nearest me came to programming. I did some new words with it.

This was way back when internet has just started. Maybe between 1985 to 1991? Not sure. I was member of a Computerclub and they had a Unix guy that was the guru to us. He new all the needed CLI and he teached us to do Linux I guess.

I had a ibm with floppy disks and a Forth had came up with a compiler that made stand alone com or exe program of forthcode. Interpreted Forth was fairly big and slow compared to these standalone small files so that was exciting to get to play with.

Sadly it all died when everybody did C and C++ and Pascal and later Java? Not sure I left it about 1999 or earlier.

What I loved most was a guy who made a kind of compiler that was made out of its own words. not sure how many one needed but I thought of it as a little miracle.

I wish I knew what became of him and his small language compiler.