jkh@MEEPMEEP.PCS.COM (Jordan K. Hubbard) (04/18/91)
Hi, I posted something to this group a fair time ago about wanting to do a small forth for a 32532 based machine's monitor. At the time I got a lot of interesting responses that fell into one of two catagories: 1. Small speedy forth kernels for such attractive processors as the 8086 and the 8080, the code for which was somewhat undecipherable and heavily 8 bit based besides. 2. Rather larger, bloated C based forth interpreters that now reside happily on my Unix system but still don't do me a heck of a lot of good for a ROM with only 32K of space. Many also like to load dictionary data from a file at runtime, which is also a problem. Ideally, I'd like the nucleaus of a mini-forth, written in C with the initial dictionary in some static array someplace. Having it in C would eliminate the porting problems (at least to a major extent) and compiling in the initial kernel would mean that I could simply copy it to RAM space as one of the first things on startup (being ROM'd, I'd have to duplicate my data somehow if it were to be writable later, of course). I find it hard to believe that someone hasn't already done something like this for a similar application. Forth is really ideally suited to something like a ROM monitor since it's small, fast, and it would give the developer an opportunity to construct rather powerful test code while the target machine was in the difficult stages of infancy. Before you ask, yes, I've considered doing this all from scratch (and even went so far as to churn out about 4k of data declarations and token codes) but really hate reinventing wheels. Any suggestions? Many thanks.. Jordan --- PCS Computer Systeme GmbH, Munich, West Germany UUCP: pyramid!pcsbst!jkh jkh@meepmeep.pcs.com EUNET: unido!pcsbst!jkh ARPA: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu or hubbard@decwrl.dec.com