Re: RFC: Primary ColorForth

Hello, ALL
Ray here...

Pick me! Pick me! I wanna play!

I'm in!

Ray

On 7/19/06, John Drake <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've been thinking about this for a while about the
> idea of us writing a colaborative book about getting
> started programming in ColorForth.  There's a lot
> of info about programming ColorForth, but it's
> spread around.  There's no definitive place I know
> of where someone can point a new user to and say
> "Here.  Follow these simple examples and you'll
> know how to program in ColorForth in 10 easy steps."
> One of the best sources of info is the mailing list
> archive, but you have to know what you're looking
> for.  Sometimes people "rediscover" what's already
> been done.  (Like me recently doing a "Hello world"
> that read from a block, only to notice today that
> someone had already posted that.  Oops. :) )
>
> Originally I was
> thinking about calling it "Starting ColorForth" as
> an homage to that the Leo Brodie book by a similair
> name and following a similair pattern.  However
> I've lately decided that a slightly different path
> is better for a few reasons.
>
> 1) No copyright issues.
> 2) A ColorForth book would need to take a different
> path.  (More on that later).
> 3) I think "Primary ColorForth" gives the same idea,
> while playing off the words "primary color".
>
> Like I said.  Originally I was thinking of following
> a similair path.  An update of Starting Forth is
> available on the web here.
>
> http://home.iae.nl/users/mhx/sf.html
>
> Here are the chapters:
>
> ===========================================
> Starting Forth First Edition, Introductions.
> Chapter 1 Fundamental Forth
> Chapter 2 How to Get Results
> Chapter 3 The Editor (and Staff)
> Chapter 4 Decision, Decisions, ...
> Chapter 5 The Philosophy of Fixed Point
> Chapter 6 Throw it for a Loop
> Chapter 7 A Number of Kinds of Numbers
> Chapter 8 Variables, Constants, and Arrays
> Chapter 9 Under the Hood
> Chapter 10 I/O and You
> Chapter 11 Extending the Compiler
> Chapter 12 Three Examples
> ===========================================
>
> The problem with following this outline is
> that ColorForth works differently from
> most other Forths.  For instance in chapter
> 1 of Starting Forth Brodie introduces the
> ":" and ";" compiling words.  But in
> ColorForth you can't compile from the
> command line.  So the editor needs to
> be introduced before you do that (or a
> whole lot of other stuff).
>
> So this is a (rough) outline of what I
> have in mind.
>
> 1) Getting started:
> - A quick overview of the
>  various installations available. (Native,
>  Windows, Unix-OpenGL, QEMU ect.)
> - How to navigate the keyboard
> - How to enter numbers and do simply arithmetic
>  (+, *, /)
>
> 2) The editor
> - Getting into the editor.  (e, edit)
> - Navigating the editor
> - Entering source (Introduce red and green words)
> - Loading blocks
> - Copying blocks
>
> 3) Calculations RP style
> - Basic stack words (dup, over, swap, push pop)
> - Fixed point math
> - Hex versus decimal
>
> 4) I/O
> - The "show" word
> - Display words (emit, h.d, ., cr, at)
> - The icon editor
> - Graphics words (Colors, box)
> - Custom keyboards with "pad"
> - Using blocks as data
> - Unpack
>
> 5) Flow control
> - Recursion and tail recursion
> - if/then
> - Looping words (for, next, i, begin, end)
>
> 6) Data structures
> - Magenta variables
> - Defining constants
> - Arrays
> - Other?
>
> 7) Under the hood
> - Memory map
> - Mark and empt
> - How the dictionary works
> - How tokenized source is stored
> - Other stuff?
>
> 8) Lots and lots of examples.
>
> That's just some ideas off the top of my head.
> Feel free to add your own.  Any volunteers?
>
> Regards,
>
> John M. Drake
>
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