Quick Forth Question

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Tue, 2006-01-24 at 02:10 -0500, Roger Merchberger wrote:
> Dudez & Dudettez:
> 
> I'm trying to get some SnapForth ROMs running for the Panasonic HHC 'puter 
> - and I'm having a bit'o'difficulty, mainly as I know... ummm... "squat" 
> about Forth. ;^>
> 
> I've gotten the ROMs to be able to start SnapForth, ask for a filename, 
> create the filename & filespace (about 1K of RAM goes "buh-bye" for every 
> filename I make... ;-) but no matter what I type, all I get is "Can't Find 
> xxxxx" where xxxxx seems to be any durned thing I type.
> 
> It can't seem to make new words, and every simple "Hello World" type 
> proggie I've found on the net makes *no* sense to the 'puter.
> 

That's odd.

Usually ." Hello, world." words on all forths.

Keep in mind you do need the space between ." and the first letter of
the string, since ." is a word (a "parsing" word since it reads ahead in
the stream till the ending ")

> It looks like it has a max. of 4-character words... duh, waitaminit... 
> lemme check the ROMs again... *maybe* 5-character words, as it looks like 
> the last character of the word is OR'ed with $80... It looks like it's got 
> quite a few words, looking at the ROMs in ASCII - I found VARIA, CONST, 
> STRIN, CVECT, JUMP....
> 

The way old Forths worked was that they saved space by matching the
first 3 characters of the name and the length. So VARIABLE != VARIANT
since the lengths are different. Maybe yours does have 5 character
words.


> I could provide a clip of the ROM word table if it would help...
> 

Might help. Sometimes you can also type WORDS at the command prompt and
see all the words.

> I've tried:
> 
> 100 LLL !
> [[ To try to store the variable 100 in LLL ]]

You mean try to store the value 100 in the variable LLL.

Well, first you need to create the variable:

VARIABLE LLL

Then you store a value in it:

100 LLL !

> 100 VAR DORK
> 100 VARI DORK
> 100 VARIA DORK
> 100 VARIABLE DORK

Type the whole word.

Are you trying to make a variable or a constant?

VARIABLE DORK
100 DORK !
DORK @ .

or...

100 CONSTANT DORK
DORK .


Newer Forths have a word called VALUE which is close to the semantics
you made up for VARIABLE.

Also, you can just use CREATE as so:

CREATE DORK

> [[ To try to store the variable 100 in DORK ]]
> 100 CONS BURP
> 100 CONST BURP
> [[ To try to make BURP a constant of 100 ]]
> 

the word is CONSTANT

> I've also tried:
> 
> .S

This word prints out the contents of the stack. If you put something on
there first, it should print something.

1 2 3 4 5 .S

> DROP

Don't do this unless you have something on the stack to drop. Actually,
try it it should give you an error if there's nothing on the stack.

> ." Hello World"
> 

That should work in most Forths.

> and other things I'd seen in various webpages thanks to Google.
> 
> Anyone got any other idears for me?

Try to do some arithmetic ala

100 2 * .

Next step is a simple word like SQUARE

: SQUARE DUP * ;

5 SQUARE .

-- John.