Rewriting for Linux?

Mitch Bradley wmb at firmworks.com
Mon Apr 2 03:03:03 EDT 2007



Don Hopkins wrote:
>
> Hey Mitch, is there a version of your Forth that runs under Linux, or 
> do I have to type L1-A (or whatever it is on the OLPC) and halt the 
> operating system to get at the Forth interpreter?  I miss the old 
> Forthmacs that I used to run under SunOS on the SPARC.
>
Yeah, get the OFW source tree from svn://openbios.org/openfirmware .

The Forth core is in cpu/x86/build/tools.dic  (dictionary file) and 
cpu/x86/Linux/forth (OS glue).

It is basically the "old Forthmacs" of which you speak.  The one 
deficiency is that it doesn't handle error signals nearly as slickly as 
it used to.  Signals basically kill the process.  All the high-level 
infrastructure for good trap handling is still there, but the low-level 
handler for finding the saved registers isn't present for Linux.  I 
expect it would be possible to do that, but I haven't bothered.




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