About Forth and accessories Since I noticed the language Forth I have paid attention whenever I saw something written about it. So a couple of years ago I saw a complete system with source, Frank Sergeant´s
Pygmy. Here´s glossaries for the kernel with 446 entries and additional options with 71 entries. I started out to get a closer acquaintance with Forth this time. But, there´s always a "but"?
isn´t there, the Millenium was upsetting people and with that the available time diminished. I also paid for a connection to the Internet. When climbing around Internet, one night I found something that got my interest. One Neal Bridges
had done an implementation of Forth for some odd gadget, the PalmPilot. Well, I found a way to hand out some money for such a thing. When I had learned some about the PalmPilot I did an installation of PilotFORTH. Now I was able to carry it with me. That was
a relief. I wasn´t forced to plan ahead bringing my laptop with me. Traveling by train, on the Metro, even sitting on a bench in a park, I could tinker with my old acquaintance, Forth. It became even more interesting when Quartus was released.
The Quartus implementation is available as a package with, besides the actual Forth engine, some libraries. When trying to sort out what´s available from the included libraries I did put together glossaries. Be patient,
there are 483 entries, so it´ll take a while to render. I´ve a glossary with words in library order. And I didn´t stop there, here´s one in alphabetical order.
In addition to the above I´ve managed to get the glossaries into files in MobileDB format. With these you have a smoth way to carry the glossaries on your PalmPilot and an easy way to search the content.
Look at the specific pages for the download buttons to the zipped files. (If you haven´t already done so, pick up a copy of MobileDB Lite. You can harness other databases as well. There´s plenty to chose from.) After the original
release of Quartus, 99.3.2, there have been added some new memos about changes and added technology. Neal Bridges published, 00.4.8 5:30pm, a file "Colornames" with the Netscape named colors. When looking through this file I discovered that the color lime
existed twice. So I started to look for a reference, if possible, to make another colormap. With the help of a homemade program I parsed it and built a new file. When loaded it occupies 3866 bytes. I don´t have a P3c, so
I can´t warrant if the added colors are of any significance. To get someone started to tinker with Forth I´ve collected some links that might be useful. These links connect to people who take part in
the Quartus community in the Discussion Forums at Quartus. Btw, to fetch the words in the glossaries I used a homebrewed non-Forth program. I´ve looked close and the result doesn´t seem to be contaminated. They´re
not perfect and I haven´t had time to compare the output from my trawl, against what´s in the original files. If you´re a programmer using memos to harness your code, there´s a utility you might have a look at. A short
description is given here. |