Forth love if honk then
-- /~\ Charlie Gibbs | "Some of you may die, \ / | but it's a sacrifice X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | I'm willing to make." / \ if you read it the right way. | -- Lord Farquaad (Shrek)
Yoda strong in the Forth is.
-- Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see You lose and Bill collects. |
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.
-- -- Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org
Following a train of thought... I wonder how easy it would be to get this to send MIDI over USB. With the low power, and analog as well as digital IO you could make a nice little bespoke Controller :)
-- W J G
Easy in principle if you know or can learn the relevant standards, but overall it'll still be a good few hours of cranking code out.
David
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