9 Jan
2012
9 Jan
'12
3:58 p.m.
From: eric at brouhaha.com
Cameron Kaiser wrote:
Hi
What a horrible thing to do with Forth but I see why one might want to
do something like that. It is something like how I read Forth code in
my head when looking at source.
It is Forth and not FORTH by the way. It is not an acronym(sp?).
It was suppose to be Fourth but the computer first used on only allowed
5 letters for the name.
At least that is what Chuck Moore said once.
Dwight
The Panasonic HHCs allegedly can be programmed in
SNAP.
I don't have an interpreter for mine though.
If you've got an HHC, you have the interpreter. It's in the main ROM.
What you don't have is the compiler.
SNAP is a token-threaded dialect of FORTH, developed by Friends Amis.
Most of the HHC software, other than Microsoft BASIC, is written in
SNAP. There was a SNAP cartridge that contained the compiler, allowing
native SNAP development. It was in a cartridge rather than a plugin ROM
because it is 16KB, and the maximum size 24-pin EPROM that could be used
as a plugin was 8KB.
There was also a SNAPBASIC ROM, which is completely unrelated to the
Microsoft BASIC.
I spent some time a few years back working on reverse-engineering the
SNAP interpreter, and identified the tokens for some of the most common
FORTH words, but that didn't get me beyond hand-coding very simple SNAP
programs.