On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 19:56:12 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2021-01-22, Tauno Voipio  wrote:
>
>> FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older HP
>> calculators.
>
> Forth love if honk then

I had a play with it years ago on a 6908 micro under FLEX09. It was
interesting and ran well, though I didn't really like its filing system
much: an array of 1K pages identified and referenced by page number.

What intrigued me most about it was the remarkably small amount of the
system that was 6809 binary - from memory all a FLEX directory listing
showed on the Forth floppy disk was the Forth loader and a very large
file that contained the Forth filing system. The loader was a normal FLEX
program that read page zero from the FORTH filing system and then passed
control to the first Forth word in page zero. This and the next 20-30
words were binary and did very low level stuff. Everything else was
written in Forth, so effectively the Forth runtime built itself from
source whenever it was started, and did so remarkably quickly.

I never did much more than that with Forth because the programs I wanted
to write were much easier to write in PL/9 (PL/M ported to 6809 FLEX) or
assembler and IIRC that Forth version as published could only talk to the
terminal and read or write pages in the Forth filing system, which was
limited to a single file.


--
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Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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