pForth

pForth is a simple ANS Forth compiler, intended for portability and study. It has been principally used as an environment for building other Forth compilers: metacompiling itself for the Bee portable virtual machine; compiling a cut-down version called mForth (now defunct) for RISC OS and the Beetle virtual machine, and building Machine Forth systems.

pForth is released purely in the hope that it might be interesting or useful to someone.

(I am aware that there are other Forth compilers called pForth; the duplication was unintentional.)

pForth comes pre-compiled for Bee (src/pforth-32.bin and src/pforth-64.bin).

See doc/pforth.pdf for ANSI conformance information.

Copyright and Disclaimer

The package is distributed under the GNU Public License version 3, or, at your option, any later version. See the file COPYING.

THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITH NO WARRANTY. USE IS AT THE USER'S RISK.

Installation

Bee version 1 is required (see above) in either a 32- or 64-bit build.

To build the documentation, a comprehensive TeX system such as TeXLive is required.

Building from a release tarball

From an unpacked release tarball, run:

./configure && make && make check && [sudo] make install

See the file INSTALL or the output of ./configure --help for more information.

Building from git

To build from a git checkout, GNU autotools (autoconf and automake) are also required. Run:

git submodule update --init --recursive
autoreconf -fi

and then proceed as above for a release build.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the authors of RISC Forth, the first Forth system I studied closely, which inspired me to write pForth.

Bugs and comments

Please file bug reports and make comments on GitHub, or by email (see above).

I will probably fix any bugs. Any future development is likely to involve a total rewrite; I'm particularly interested in rewriting pForth in a more Forth-like manner (more decomposed, rather than implementing each word as a single word), and perhaps using object orientation. See doc/TODO.txt.