Re: [gforth] New member, new Forther

[Matt Wilbur]

amforth is a really nice forth for AVR microcontrollers.  I've used it on Arduino boards, but I don' use the Arduino "system" as I like to get my hands dirty.  I'll be interested to see what approach SVFIG takes.  There's a really simple Forth on avrfreaks too.  I think its SX-Forth (or something like that).

To simply get a forth up and running on a bare-metal system, there are several approaches to take.  If you want to know more, I can detail it a bit, but that doesn't sound like Owen's main interest.  Just keep in mind that gforth is but one Forth implementation.  If you truly want to dig deep into Forth, I'd say there are better ways to start as gforth uses peephole optimization and lots of security in compiler directives.  

jonesforth, for one, is a really nice introduction.  The Moving Forth series by Brad Rodriguez is older, but my bible when it comes to wanting to know how to implement these things.  Threaded Interpreted Languages is a good reference, too.

If you're on Windows, F# by Offete at http://www.offete.com/files/F_.zip (an unfortunate name as it now used for a popular functional language as well) is lean and mean STC Forth and provides access to the Windows API.  There's not much documentation, so you have to be willing to dig around.  I'm sure there are others.  For Macs, PowerMOPS give you nice gui access.

Matt