rat@madnix.UUCP (David Douthitt) (05/30/89)
Richard C. Secrist (secrist@msdsws.DEC.COM) wrote:
[..about lack of Apple IIe languages..]
| So I tried native FORTH. FORTH wins pretty big, but
| most of the implementations I've seen use direct physical
| i/o to the disk and don't support anything, let alone ProDOS.
| Even nicer FORTHs still don't to record I/O right to text files.
| GraFORTH is pretty cool, does wonderful native graphics and
| sound, and compiles to 6502 code executables... but InSoft
| went bankrupt before ProDOS was even let out of the stable.
| So really nice FORTH hasn't made it to ProDOS yet for the //e,
| and the GS killed any hope of software developement by commercial
| developers.
Mad Apple Forth supports Prodos and has file-access utilities available on
a utility disk. Record IO is limited to binary-style files; that is, it
works directly to the file without using any text orientation or whatever.
There aren't any graphics words, but, as usual, you can write your own!
Mad Apple Forth is free for the asking and runs in 6502 code - so your old
II+ or IIe will work just fine. The newer versions of MAF will have a word
SAVE" inbedded in which will save the current image to disk. This way, you
can create runable code apart from the usual FORTH startup. However, it saves
the entire FORTH kernal - including the outer interpreter and the compiler.
I posted a version to comp.sys.apple a while back; I believe there are ftp
sites which are archiving this stuff, but I don't know where they are. If
you want, I can send it to you directly.
[david]
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