Re: Beginning with FORTH

[Greg Alexander <galexand@xxxxxxx>]

>I joined this list, because I am interested in CPU architecture =
>(currently just from a students/hobbyist
>side of view) and I think MISC and stack based CPUs in general are a =
>very interesting approach.
>
>I am planning to design (and build) a stack based CPU. I already built a =
>register/accu based=20
>architecture so I guess the hardware side is not the problem.
>
>My problem is, that I have no Forth experience. So I am looking for the =
>following:
>
>- A good introductionary text about forth.
>- A compiler thats usable without too much experience. Preferrable one =
>thats not
>very bloated and comes with source so I can change the target =
>architecture.
>
>Maybe someone can point me to useful resources on the web ?

Well, I have very little FORTH experience, but I had a lot less before I
started in with Frank Seargent's Pygmy Forth.  I'd previously tried to
learn things by implementing my own Forths (I usually attained what Jeff
refers to as "the first 10x" but didn't quite see how to make the whole
system consistently simple) or using Forths, but as a Linux user gforth
kept presenting itself to me and that thing's really complicated, at least
compared to Pygmy.  I found a couple other simple DOS systems but nothing
nearly as easy and usable as Pygmy.  I've even written a couple 'programs'
using it [it seems odd to say that I've written a program that plays a
game with the user since I didn't have to write any user interface code]
with it.  It comes with complete source for free, and it is very easy to
browse it...It's not ANS compatable or anything, though...I think it's
modeled roughly after cmForth.  The coolest single thing I found in Pygmy
Forth is 'VIEW foo' which views the sourcecode to the word foo if foo was
compiled normally.  For like $15 you can get a file that has comments for
the whole code in a shadow file (hit ^A to switch between source code and
comments, pretty powerful actually) from the author, but I found the code
perfectly readable without it.  Pygmy is for DOS, btw...one of the reasons
I love it so much is that it's the only development environment that
allows me to be as productive with my HP-95LX palmtop as I am with my home
PC.  Also it's the only development environment that I've met where I
could browse the code on-line in a completely reasonable manner -- have
you ever tried grepping around in libc source for something?
  http://www.eskimo.com/~pygmy/forth.html

Of course this is definitely not the end-all on cool free Forth
implementations.