Forth Classes

Hi,

My name is Jason Damisch. I am the instructor of the Forth Class. I will strive to write useful and interesting information here.

I am involved with the The Forth Interest Group or FIG for short. It is the area Forth club, and has been around for many years. I was at the FIG meeting today ( 10-12-09 ) and was able to have a stack of Forth Books given to me which will go into the library at Noisebridge. These books are

Starting Forth - primer Thinking Forth - read after Starting Forth or Mastering Forth, Teaches good Forth Style Discover Forth - primer Mastering Forth (2x) - primer Forth Notebook - more advanced example code Inside F83 - Explains the F83 Forth system, gives an overview of how a Forth system works inside.

Our copy of Starting Forth is falling apart. If anybody can have this book rebound I would appreciate it.

An online copy of the book Starting Forth can be found here. <A HREF="http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/index.html">STARTING FORTH</A>

About 15 people showed up for the FIG meeting. The FIG website is here <A HREF="http://www.forth.org/">F.I.G.</A>

The annual Forth Day will be held at Stanford University, Saturday November 21st

http://www.forth.org/svfig/next.html

I'll be at that meeting. Charles Moore, the inventor of Forth, should be there as well.

FIG holds meetings at Stanford University every third Saturday of the month. The one in November is Forth Day, which is special.

I'll be teaching out of the book "Starting Forth" by Leo Brodie. It is considered a classic in the Forth Community. It is a clear and easy to understand introduction to Forth, and kind funny too.

long time ago, I wrote an arcade game in Forth for the Atari ST called Skampy. It actually runs fast and is stable. It has everything a videogame is supposed to have, speed, sound, collision detection, levels, scoring. I will show it to anybody who is interested in seeing it. There is even an end cartoon for the people who get past the 10th level. LOL Good Luck!

WHAT IS FORTH?

Forth is programming in the extensible Macro Assembler of a very simple virtual machine, one which features two stacks, one for paramater passing, and one for holding return addresses. It also features Reverse Polish Notation, or RPN.

WHAT CAN FORTH DO?

In a nutshell, Forth can do anything that C can do, theoretically. Both are very flexible general purpose programming languages. Here are some example of some applications which have been writing using Forth.

<A HREF="http://www.forth.com/starting-forth/index.html">SOME FORTH APPLICATIONS</A>

There has recently been published a Forth Foundation Library.

<A HREF="http://code.google.com/p/ffl/">FORTH FOUNDATION LIBRARY</A>