home .. forth .. colorforth mail list archive ..

Re: [colorforth] Are we still alive ?


Hi,
I am alive and going well indeed.

My efforts now point towards a
colored forth that suit my tastes
of extreme simplicity and compatibility.

So my color forth use NASM as assembler.
I have the (8 bit tokens) aha-like compiler part finished,
I only need the editor and the program is finished.
The compiler is in the 400 bytes compiled range,
and I want the editor to be as small as that.
My system use 8 colors in Edit mode, 6 token types
in compile mode and a 30 or so instructions (very) c18-like
at runtime. I implemented the ?dup word and not
the litteral optimization part. I only need tokenized
source code to test it; The system will be Public Domain.
I'm not going to use any defined word dictionary, I will only
search through source code at edit time. Only a 256 bytes
static dictionary will be used to compile virtual instrcutions from source.
(3 bytes of the word + 1 byte address* 64 different function possibles)
The compiler is so fast (in theory), each time a program is wanted
its first loaded into any of the 16 screens available and then it get
compiled and executed.The compiler build the dictionary and compile
all new program into a "scratch" array, so there's no more .exe or object
code stored anywhere. Just living source code =)

I saw that page: http://www.bytecraft.com/touchsw.html
It could ease the fabrication of an homemade keyboard
wired to the parallel port, who knows? This little electrical
trick is wonderful.
I would like to build my OWN keyboard, maybe just a
thick circle like a cd divided in 8, so I point with my fingers
where I want things to go and I clickby  pressing two
or more "sectors" of the device.

Handling keyboard input on a PC is beefy,
maybe rewriting the char map in video mem would help.
(direct scancodes to screen, no ASCII to mess with would be nice)
The icon program of Chuck's Colorforth could be adapted to textmode.
I saw some docs on doing this but I didn't have time to try anything,
I'm moving in my new appartement to start my college years =)

So my system differs from Chuck as its not DWord-based and I try to use
the old textmode hardware instead of a rendering task and to get the
smallest and simplest code possible, maybe to the expense of performance.
I'm also willing to build my own keyboard using a pcb making kit or
cat5 wires and aluminium foil with plastic membrane on top, I'll try as
soon as possible.

See ya!
CrowKiller


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: colorforth-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: colorforth-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx