info-mac@uw-beaver (info-mac) (10/15/84)
From: Piersol.pasa@XEROX.ARPA I have just recieved my copy of Level 2 MacForth from Creative Solutions, and I must say I'm pleased. The new version appears to be well worth the extra money, and has several goodies included which were not in my Level 1 package. Among these extras were: An in-line 68000 assembler package, a debugger, full support of Quickdraw, full support of the serial ports, full support of the TE package (the standard Mac text editing routines), and an overall improvement in the quality of documentation. With the support of TE and the serial ports, some basic examples and sources are given for building text editor windows. A simple terminal emulator is also included, and looks to be nicely expandable. Not only are these useful in themselves, but they also give some good insights into writing MacForth code. The expanded QuickDraw support includes creation and manipulation of Regions and Pictures. From the documentation, it's easy to see why Alice appeared so early on the Mac. Quickdraw supports marvellous facilities which allow the kind of animation used in the Alice game, and MacForth has a good interface to them. A marvellous demo and example portrays a running four-stroke engine, with variable speed. The speed is controlled with a standard Toolbox slide control, and serves as a nice example of how to interface with the Mac Control Manager. In the expanded documentation, a translation table is given relating the Toolbox names given in 'Inside Macintosh' to the MacForth words which perform these functions. In all cases, there seemed a much better attention to detail than in the Level 1 product. A large number of Toolbox routines are supported, including heap and object management. As you can see, I was most impressed. Demo's appear clear and concise, the documentation is adequate to good, and the new features look excellent. I have not spent enough time with it to give any information on reliability, robustness, etc. However, the patches which came with Level 1 are incorporated into Level 2, so it looks like Creative Solutions has been working on fixes. For those interested in Forth, Level 2 is a more mature and complete Forth environment than Level 1. It has, I feel, arrived as a full Mac programming environment. Kurt Piersol