Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 15:34:17 -0800 (PST) From: "Bruce R. Montague" <brucem@mail.cruzio.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: beastie boot menu, 4th (forth) Message-ID: <200401092334.i09NYHHQ000311@mail.cruzio.com>
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Hi, re the question from Roman Neuhauser <neuhauser@bellavista.cz> Fri, 9 Jan 2004: > forth looks like it's an interesting .. language. > Can anyone recommend good (or just > any, really) introductory material? --- If you do want to get into Forth, you can probably find some of the following in a decent research library: * The common leading intro text to Forth was: "Starting FORTH", Leo Brodie, FORTH, Inc., Prentice Hall, 1981. * Another good intro was: "FORTH", W.P. Salerman, O.Tisserand, and B. Toulout, Springer-Verlag, 1983. * It's not a tutorial, but it may be helpful: "FORTH Encyclopedia: The Complete FORTH Programmer's Manual", Mitch Derick and Linda Baker, 2nd ed., Mountain View Press, 1982. * Uneven, but potentially very good for the novice, "Invitation to FORTH", Harry Katzan, Jr., PBI, 1981. * If nothing else, you should be able to find this influential introductory paper by an IBMer, which arguably played an important role in legitimizing Forth use: "An Architectural Trail to Threaded-Code Systems", Peter M. Kogge, "IEEE Computer", v.15,n.3, pp.22-32, March 1982. --- If you are used to any RPN language, such as found on an HP calculator, or Postscript, you will find getting into Forth rather easy (Although not the same, Forth and Postscript are very similar). It's not often described this way, but you can somewhat think of Forth as a stand-alone interactive threaded-code compiler backend, which you can program directly using the compiler's intermediate language and interact with the symbol table. Forth is at it's best when you have small (<32K), unique embedded systems (perhaps with custom architecture) and have no existing toolchain. I think you could find a Forth in the ports tree to get up-to-speed with, before looking at boot-time FICL... Paul Frenger has a Forth column in SIGPLAN notices. For instance, the only published academic reference that I am aware of that describes PicoBSD is "Forth and the FreeBSD Bootloader", Paul Frenger, "ACM SIGPLAN Notices", August 2000, v.35,n.8, pp.15-17. I don't know how active this is, but there are many links: http://www.forth.org Forth seems to have become heavily used in spacecraft. The instrument platform on the US probe that landed on as asteroid awhile back was all Forth, if I understand correctly. Both US and USSR used Forth this way. See also: http://forth.gsfc.nasa.gov Reasonably impressive list... - bruce
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