oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) (07/21/87)
Laxen and Perry's No Visible Means Of Support software includes a complete,
self-metacompiling forth-83 system for cp/m 68k. That means complete source
code for everything. It is distributed on
IBM compatible floppies, and includes a 68000 assembler. The assembler was
also published by Dr. Dobbs as an article. I've ported the whole thing to
the macintosh. (Macintosh MasterType is written in it.)
If you want a _standard_ reverse polish notation language that runs on 32-bit
processors, look into PostScript. Both Sun and NeXT have promised it as the
language of their extensible window managers, and Sun is shipping now. If you
write a decent PostScript, it will be worth a lot of money. At the very
least, you should subscribe to comp.lang.postscript .
I've stopped writing Forth programs, my Macintosh LightSpeed C environment
makes me so much more productive. Why can't we have a Forth with the following
features:
1.) the ability to make a small change and be ready to test without having
to wait more then 10 seconds for everything above it to reload.
2.) a type system that catches errors like words not matching their stack
comments and inappropriate application of operators to operands (in C
the single operator "+"
does the right thing independent of whether the operands are 8 bit, 16 bit
32 bit, or mixed, signed or unsigned, and C never crashes because I forgot a
DROP in one branch of a conditional.)
3.) a multi-window editor that will let me search a group of files in a
single command.
4.) pull down menus that show me everything the current context depends on.
Select an item, and that file is opened in a window and brought to the top.
5.) control-double click on a WORD, and its definition comes up in another
window.
6.) pattern matching search and replace in the editor, with named sub-patterns
(I can issue a single editor command that looks for all words beginning with
an "s" followed by a word beginning with a "t", and swaps them.
7.) no limits on source file length or width ("Screens?, Come On man, this is
the 20th century!")
8.) automatic dependency analysis, so if I change the interface of a word, and
everything that depend on it, and no more, is recompiled with a single
key-stroke. (For Unix types, this means the Mac C compiler derives
the Make files automatically.)
9.) no limit on code size.
10.) an integrated assembler.
11.) An object oriented graphics editor for composing user-interface screens.
12.) A bitmap editor for designing my own fonts.
13.) A debugger that runs in a separate window from the program I am debugging,
and doesn't mess up the the program under test's display (i.e., restores
the application's screen bits on each proceed.)
I get all the above in LightSpeed C for $175.00. Its worth it to me. There is
restriction on how I sell the copiled code.
----
I don't already have these, but interlisp-D does, and they would be nice:
a.) automatic pretty printing
b.) a debugger that let's me break into a running program, redefine one
of the procedures pending on the stack, and proceed.
--- David Phillip Oster --My Good News: "I'm a perfectionist."
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --My Bad News: "I don't charge by the hour."
Uucp: {seismo,decvax,...}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu