marc@noe.UUCP (Marc de Groot) (07/19/89)
In my experience, there is no Forth that is easily compatible/portable between the MS-DOS and UNIX world. I would like to know of such a beast if it exists. Under UNIX, there seems to be a woeful lack of good Forth interpreters. Allan Pratt wrote one called C-Forth. I have played with it a bit. It is buggy as supplied. The disk I/O does not work under System V. If you have some experience with Forth interpreters it isn't too hard to fix up. Mitch Bradley has a Forth interpreter that is purported to be very good. I have never used it. It is written for Suns and has very impressive I/O support. I understand that it can be booted on a Sun stand-alone and used to manipulate everything from the graphics to the Ethernet port. I re- iterate that this is hearsay and I haven't seen for myself. A long time ago, I played with a UNIX Forth written by Micheal MacNeil for Version 7. It was on a PDP-11/70 at UC Berkeley. It even had an on-line man page. It had a string stack and access to the version 7 system calls. It was pretty spiffy. Does anyone know where there is a listing of this Forth? I would like to kick around some ideas about a Forth system whose purpose would be to provide large machine users with a portable, standard, useable development environment. Here's where I start: 32-bit Forth Written in C (because it's ubiquitous in the environments I care about) String package Floating point package File I/O package Rich set of primitives Access to C library system calls (fork() etc) -- Marc de Groot (KG6KF) These ARE my employer's opinions! Noe Systems, San Francisco UUCP: uunet!hoptoad!noe!marc Internet: marc@kg6kf.AMPR.ORG