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by tbirdz 3709 days ago
This is a bit off topic, but would you mind sharing what resources you used to learn forth? I'm interested in the language myself, but I don't really get how to use it. I've learned the basics about defining words and manipulating the stack, but whenever I try to apply it to an actual problem, I have a very hard time even understanding how to approach, wheras if I were using a procedural or OO language, I would know where to start.

Any advice on getting over this hump?
1 comments
eggy 3709 days ago
There are the main books everyone refers to like 'Thinking Forth' [1], and others, but I really learned faster by picking up Factor [2] and Retro [3]. The community on Factor is very helpful and smart. I actually wrote my first real Forth program for work in Factor. I had written a lot of one-liners, and some curiosities, but this was a business need met in one night. It was basically a program to munge a whole lot of tab-delimted text files, and do some math on fields and then generate a report. It was all < 100 LOC, and it was easy to interactively test if I was missing anything in the interpreter. Retro is cool, since it is so minimal, and there are add-ons for Chrome so you can run it in your browser locally to try it; otherwise, you download the image file for your platform, and Retro itself. Retro was built on a VM called Ngaro, which is an interesting diversion, but not Forth. There are also microcontroller ports of Forth [4], which I found a lot easier than using the assembler for a particular microcontroller. FlashForth has been recently updated, and is featured in a 'Circuit Cellar' magazine article. I have also purchased iForth [5], since I had stopped dual-booting linux at the time, and it offered a lot for Windows, and mathematics (fast). I hope these help you get started. If you are a maker, using an Arduino or PIC-like chip with FlashForth is great. The whole dictionary, or word list (all the defined functions called 'words' in Forth, are listed in the reference I provided). In Forth, you can easily add to the dictionary, it is concise enough to know your whole system in a short time, and add to it when you need it. Good luck!

  [1]  http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/ 
  [2]  https://factorcode.org/
  [3]  http://forthworks.com/retro/
  [4]  http://flashforth.com/tutorials.html
  [5]  http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/
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tbirdz 3709 days ago
Thanks for the reply. Those look like some pretty cool resources, and I can't wait to check them out.
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