Introduction

What’s FORTHified?

FORTHified is a minimalist implementation of a FORTH interpreter. FORTH is a language developped in the 60’s by Chuck Moore, which features a reverse-polish syntax, an interactive prompt and an embedded compiler. This late means FORTH can extends itself.

Although FORTH was normalised in 1994 by the American National Standards Institute, my implementation doesn’t intend to strictly follow this standard. Even if most of its behaviour should be correct, the ANSI required instructions set isn’t completed (but could certainly be).

Genesis

I worked initially on this project during my university studies: the understanding of FORTH interpreters mechanism is very formative, and moreover stills be an interresting programming exercice.

The original version was based on my lecturer’s design, coded within a students team using a C dialect (kind of C++ without object oriented stuffs) under GNU/Linux.

I finally rework the interpreter a little, notably:
 switched from C++ to full ANSI C
 ported from GNU-Linux to Windows NT (and solved the unbuffered standard input hell!)
 fully rewritten other students parts to hold full copyright on the program
 made a couple of optimization, such as for stacks and words dictionary
 removed some memory restrictions

Requirements

FORTHified runs on Microsoft Windows platforms. I tested it on Windows NT, but it should also work on 95/98/ME versions. There is no other dependencies, not even the C runtime, so a ten years old Windows is really enough to use FORTHified.