Date   : Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:07:29 +0100
From   : mlist@... (Steven Flintham)
Subject: Forth manuals

On 22/09/10 16:38, Mike Pepper wrote:
> The two classic texts on FORTH in general are: Leo Brodie's 'Starting FORTH'
> and 'Thinking FORTH'. Both available as free downloads.
>
>   http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2316

Cheers, I stumbled across those already.

> Is there a language interest developing? FORTH on the BBC was great, but

I'm not sure. I have these little phases of odd interest. This one 
started when I was at work and suddenly started wondering about what 
languages could work efficiently on a 6502. A few web searches later I 
was reading about Forth. The weird combination of elegance and sheer 
WTF-ness of Forth started to sucker me in further. I could stick with 
playing with gforth on Linux, but it feels a bit like I'm cheating to 
have such a powerful environment. :-)

> needed a, but needed a lot of work to make stand-alone code. My favourite
> high level one, after the mighty BBC BASIC itself, was BCPL, which did have
> a stand alone generator, and was like getting hold of a real program

Oddly enough, way back when I was at university, I went through a 
similar phase of interest in BCPL. I even ported Martin Richards' 
compiler, at least to the extent of having it compile itself while 
running (as CINTCODE, not natively) on a Master 128, using a bank of 
sideways RAM and shadow screen to get 40K-ish of contiguous RAM. I 
either didn't look at Acornsoft's implementation at the time or it 
wasn't freely available on the net. (This was back in 1996 or so.)

> development system for the first time. Amazing thing - you could halt a
> running program with<escape>, look over it's variables and traces, and

I will have to find time to dig out the Acornsoft BCPL stuff some time 
and take a look, that sounds very "big computer"-y for a BBC.

Steve