Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Classic book Starting FORTH now available online

By Vasudev Ram - dancingbison.com | @vasudevram | jugad2.blogspot.com

This post is for programming language fans.

FORTH is a pretty interesting language. It's one of the oldest programming languages.


It was originally invented by Charles Moore to control telescopes in the early days of computing:

http://www.forth.com/resources/evolution/evolve_0.html

(Also make sure to google for FORTH and check the Wikipedia entry, etc.)

The classic FORTH language tutorial, the book "Starting FORTH", is now available online.

Check it out here:

http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/?programming

The book's author was Leo Brodie:

http://punchandbrodie.com/leo/

(Again, google for him.)

I was lucky enough to find a copy of the original book (in hard-cover!) many years ago, when I was fairly new to programming, and bought it on the spot :), even though it was a bit expensive for me back then.

I enjoyed reading it, and playing around with the language using a FORTH interpreter.

Now you can read the entire book online at the above URL if you're interested in going FORTH :)

Here is the introduction page, which is quite interesting too, and may spark your interest in FORTH:

http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/sf0/sf0.html

Some people say that is more efficient than assembly language for certain types of programs.

Whether or not that is the case, I certainly found it a fun and unique language to program in.

YMMV, of course. Only one way to find out ... (TM). [1]


UPDATE: I checked out a FORTH implementation, GForth (that's GNU FORTH) v0.5.0 for DOS. Tried the Windows version first but the EXE gave some error, and I didn't want to bother right then with building it from the Windows source. There is also a Linux version which you can try out; you may have to build it from source using the usual configure / make / make install method (plus maybe some tweaks). You can find the GNU FORTH site via Google: http://google.com/search?q=GNU+FORTH


Anyway, the DOS version of GForth worked okay. I could enter a few FORTH expressions and they ran right.
Also defined and ran a FORTH word or two to check a bit more. That worked too. Looking forward to doing some FORTH programming in my spare time ...

.

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- Vasudev Ram @ Dancing Bison


[1] By trying it :)


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