cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne (055908)) (05/26/91)
In article <2811.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us> ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie) writes: >Category 1, Topic 19 >Message 34 Sat May 25, 1991 >P.VARN [Paul Varn] at 01:14 PDT > >I couldn't find another place to post a request for help. I'm trying to learn >Forth on the Atari ST. I have the '83 version of Brodie's book but I'm having >trouble with starting out. I can't figure out how to create a new file so I >can open and edit it. I also can't figure out how to remove or add blocks to >a file. The implementations I've tried are: F83.TOS and F65K.TOS. > >Can anyone suggest a better documented ST Forth to learn from or give me some >hints on the ones I've tried to get me over the starting learning curve? >Thank you. I think I've got nearly every Forth ever made for the ST: (Excluding Abacus' MultiForth, or whatever it's called). F83 XForth Dragon Group 4XForth ForST HDForth F83 is not BAD, but it's a little outdated, and doesn't have too many Atari- specific extensions (that MAY be an advantage for compatibility - the other Forths are pretty customized - There's quite a bit of code out there that is specifically designed around the F83 system). F83 does NOT do Atari specific stuff like GEM/AES/VDI... XForth, by Mitch Bradley, is a very nice system. Nice integration of an Emacs editor, a LARGE Atari-specific word set, NICE decompiler... I keep on starting to fool around with applications on other Forths, give up because they're too unfriendly/buggy, and come back to XForth. If you want to choose just one system that works real good (but may not be optimized for ULTIMATE speed), XForth is your system. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! XForth CAN do GEM/AES/VDI stuff, I'm not sure how well... 4XForth is a real speed demon of a Forth that now comes with a pretty decent floating point + matrix math word set. It's REAL fast, and has a large word set, but they've got a confused attitude towards blocks versus stream files, and thus it's not terribly friendly. As well, they do NOT believe in decompilation, and don't have any real equivalent to WORDS/VLIST. If you can get it cheap, and have to do some CPU intensive work, then it's a good deal. Otherwise... (And by the way, 4XForth DOES have GEM/AES/VDI interfacing words) ForST is a recent optimizing Forth written by John Redmond in Australia. It comes with FULL assembler source (none of this ugly metacompiling stuff), runs pretty quick, and has nice-looking wordsets for dealing with files, floating point, probably some other "f" words. Alas, I haven't been able to get it to run reliably. Maybe there's some sort of TOS version dependancy, or a dependency on Australia's 50Hz... I haven't been able to keep it running for more than about 10 minutes without bombing... If it was more reliable that way, it would be a very nice environment ESPECIALLY since it is SPECIFICALLY designed to interface nicely with the OUTSIDE operating system. You can use your favorite editor INSIDE ForST, run UN*X utilities from Forth, all sorts of neat stuff. The one thing that ForST is missing is access to GEM/AES/VDI calls - Redmond wants this Forth to be (relatively) portable between different 68000 machines... HDForth may be difficult to find... It is the language in which the DBASE II compatible H&DBase was written... It's got SOME AES/GEM/VDI interfacing words, but I've never used it for any real programming. I've really just used the database, but I hear some people were trying to enhance HDForth a couple of years back... Anyway, grab a copy of XForth to use as a learning tool, and if you have a particular application requiring some feature that's missing there, then try one of the alternatives. -- Christopher Browne cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca University of Ottawa Master of System Science Program