Release: Crim

[Eduardo Nahum Ochs <edrx@xxxxxxxxxx>]

People:

In the last weeks I got some ideas for a personal project that I've
had for more than 5 years, and now the code is working and some docs
are written down.

The project is called Crim. It's an inner interpreter that looks like
Forth's inner interpreter at some points but is very extensible; it
makes clear the fact that most Forth's inner interpreters are always
in one of a few "modes" -- for an indirect-threaded i386 Forth they
are "Forth", "CFA" and "CODE", for example -- and it lets you add more
modes easily. Of course most of the time we'd like to write these
modes in Forth itself; Crim has a very simple solution for this, using
a third stack and the "RSR words" described in the docs. Words that
take immediate data -- like <."> -- become trivial to write with this
technique.

The thing is absurdly simple, and yet it runs (at least on Linux, as
it depends on Tcl and Nasm), and one of its demos even shows how to
call arbitrary C functions... Ok, I confess: the code is not useful if
you just want to run it, it's more like the kernel of something that
doesn't yet exist... anyway, it can be found through
<http://angg.twu.net/forth.html>, and I thought that some of you could
be interested in it.

Cheers,
  Eduardo Ochs
  http://angg.twu.net/
  http://angg.twu.net/forth.html
  edrx@inx.com.br



P.S.: I'm feeling like Chuck Moore in this story (gotten from
<http/www.ultratechnology.com/mmeta.html>): ``Chuck showed Mike that
he had written the core of the CAD application in about five lines of
code. When Mike asked him how long it had taken, he replied, "Oh,
about two years."''...

P.P.S.: The `official' release should happen in about one week.

P.P.P.S.: Feedback is welcome and flames will NOT be redirected to
/dev/null!