Date   : Tue, 14 Jul 1987 17:42:13 GMT
From   : tektronix!tekcrl!tekgvs!toma@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Almy)
Subject: Re: cpmForth

In article <1251@dicome.UUCP> martino@dicome.UUCP (Mark Martino) writes:
>Someone mentioned that there is a version of Forth written in C and it's
>available in one of the CP/M sig libraries.  Has anyone else heard of this?
>Do you know how I can get a copy of it?  Thanks.

Well, there is "pistol".  This program compiles only under BDS C.  I tried
porting it to other environments with very bad results -- virtually every
line fails lint.

I have never found a Forth in C worth fooling with.  The problems have been:

1. The Interpretter is very slow -- it goes from about 8 instructions (Z-80)
ending with a jump to a subroutine call in a loop (with all the subroutine
call overhead), and the registers cannot be globally assigned.  Figure an
overall 10x speed loss.

2. No implementation I have ever found has compiled on any machine other
than that for which it was originally written.

3. They were all done as experiments (can Forth be written in C?) and as
such tend to be incomplete.

Tom Almy
toma@tekgvs.tek.com
(Usual disclaimer applies)