XForth

." Hello world!"

Overview

Xforth is intended to ease the use of FORTH on modern systems. It has a tiny codebase, and adding more native features easily is a priority. It is not ANSI compliant, however it is designed in a way that I believe to be superior, in both minimalism and ease of use.

Goals

Simplicity
Efficiency
Minimalism

Prerequisites

This project requires GNU make, gcc, and ruby. All of the language is written in C, however the extension mechanism uses ruby to parse the C files.

Building

Simply type make. To rapidly test new additions, make run will build and start the interpreter. To install (unix-like only), sudo make install.

Running

A simple frontend is provided in frontend/xforth.rb. To run after installation, simply try xforth repl. If you add another entry point in the C code, you can use that as your entry point instead of repl.

Extending The Language

Though described in much more details in doc/extend.txt, a simple example is:

//This code will add a new word named rot to the language via C

//g r rot rot
void rot(){
	//^Note that the bracket trails the function name
	unsigned int a, b, c;
	a = pop();
	b = pop();
	c = pop();
	push(c);
	push(b);
	push(a);
}

Using the Language

( if you've ever used forth before, you'll feel right at home)
." This will print this string"
1 2 + . ( This will add these two numbers and print them)

Xforth vs Gforth

This is not a replacement for Gforth, however it is intended to make interactions with modern OSs easier. Support for real files etc. is in the works, and I plan to release a fork with sockets eventually.

Happy Hacking!

16Bitt/xforth