Re: yet another colorforth

Thank you for sharing.

I look forward to downloading it and giving it a spin.

On Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:06:31 -0500, "David J. Goehrig"
<[email protected]> said:
> So my new colorforth dialect is compiling itself, and I've got a couple
> screen shots up on a website.
> 
> http://newscript.org
> 
> It differs from Chuck's Colorforth in a number of ways, but owes a huge
> debt to it in terms of programming philosophy and spirit.  Probably the
> most significant departure is in how color is applied to words.  Rather
> than having a bunch of different space bars, I use space, tab, and enter
> in different combinations to change the case of the word.  This means
> that whitespace is syntactically significant similar to Python.
> 
> There is also some additional grammar that isn't described on the website
> yet that some people may find fun.  Newscript has no IF THEN or FOR NEXT
> constructs.  Rather is uses punctuation to designate different mood or
> tenses: 
> 
> 	word?	interogative mood, conditional jump
> 	word.	imperative  mood, unconditional jump
> 	word,	adjuvantive mood, call & drop
> 	word;	future tense, push word onto return stack
> 	word	present tense, call word
> 	
> So branching requires factoring out each branch.  IF ELSE THEN translates
> roughly to:
> 	
> 	thenword; ifword? elseword.
> 
> Push the thenword onto the return stack, then if the condition is met
> jump to ifword (which returns to thenword), or jump to elseword (which
> then returns to thenword).  So far I've never actually used ; for this
> purpose, but its there :)
> 
> Similarly, variables can have @ and ! appended directly to them in order
> to compile an immediate fetch or store opcode: (stand alone @ and ! still
> exist and work as expected)
> 
> 	word!	locative case,	store at the address of word
> 	word@	genetive case,	fetch from the address of word
> 
> Since the address of word (whatever it might be) is known at compile
> time, (and compile time can be at run time), these usages only compile
> the address of word as an immediate value in the x86 instruction.  With
> the top two items on the data stack stored in registers, the resulting
> code almost never touches the data stack at all.  As a result, I'm both
> very happy with the speed of compilation and execution.  But most of all,
> I love having a color coded forth, with both syntax and grammar! 
> 
> Anyways, code will be available soon-ish, as I'd like to put the
> finishing touches on the OpenGL based editor before releasing it into the
> wild.  The ncurses interface is useable, but currently requires using a
> C-bootstrap executable to get running.  Also the Mach-O generation really
> needs to be rewritten in Newscript, because patching the header is just
> too prone to breaking when building larger images.
> 
> Hope this inspires some people to go out and start playing with their
> colorforths again!
> 
> Dave
> 
> 
> 
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