15 Apr
2005
15 Apr
'05
11:17 a.m.
From: "woodelf" <bfranchuk at
jetnet.ab.ca>
Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
Hi
It should be noted that the first version of Word Star ( I think
that is the one ) was written in Forth. I'm not saying the fellow
that did it was using Forth correctly, just that he was able to
get it working in a time frame that would have been unrealistic
using BASIC or assembly( by his words ).
Floating point has been a common extension to Forth for a
number of years. It is just that most uP implementations were
done from FIG source listing that didn't have floating point.
The lack of floating point has surely caused many to avoid
Forth. It is a shame that most all applications that the person
believes that floating point is needed can often be better
implemented in integer of fixed point. It is a shame that
most uP's don't properly support fixed point multiplies and
divides.
Dwight
Hi
They also had ROMs for Forth, that I find more useful than
BASIC.
Well if Forth had floating point math is could see it competing with BASIC.
Other than GAMES I found very little other calculator style programs could
be written in BASIC. In hindsight word processing and acounting and games
that really made the mass market for computers. Ben alias woodelf
PS. while on the topic of 6502's , does anybody know where I can get
a pdf online data sheet 68B50 ? Datasheets for the 8 bit stuff is getting
harder to find all the time for the original products.
All 6800 stuff is getting hard to find. Recently I was writing
a disassembler for the 6800 to look at code on a pinball machine.
I had to dig real deep into my pile of books before finding
something with the code described in it.
Dwight