Programmer 7500/MAX_PROGRAMMERS.iso/CLIPPER/MISC/FPC225_2.ZIP/F-PCDOC.ZIP/GREETING.DOC

Text File | 1988-06-01 | 11.8 KB | 283 lines

GREETINGS TO AUSTRALIAN FORTH SYMPOSIUM


It was a suprise to us that this F-PC system will be first released
in Australia.  As Bob Reiling demanded that we give him a copy to
take to the Symposium, we are just as happy to comply and present
it as a gift helping celebrating your 200th Anniversary.  As you
read on, you will find that the F-PC Working Group here still has
lots of work unfinished, especially on the Systems Manual.  We
hope that many of you will find this project worthy of your time
and effort that you will also contribute to it.  We will be very
pleased if you will also try to organized a working group to
exercise this system and generate some documentation to be
collected and redistributed to help users.


Representing the F-PC Working Group:

    Charles Curley
    Jerry Modrow
    Robert L. Smith
    C. H. Ting
    Tom Zimmer

San Jose, California,  May 10, 1988


1.  HOW DID WE GET HERE?



This F-PC system started out as an experiment to see if a
development environment could be created that would be as
interactive as a BLOCK Forth system, with as many of the same
tools as possible.

Over the past several years, the programming community for other
languages have changed somewhat.  Several years ago, Forth had
enormous advantages over Fortran, Pascal, and C in terms of
development interactivity.  The Forth development cycle was very
short, and new code modules could be put together for
experimentation very quickly.  As the years went by, the
Programmers for these other languages began to realize there had
to be something better than their traditional compile debug cycle,
i.e.

          ----> Enter the editor from operating system.
          | |   Make changes with LINE editor.
          | |   Leave editor back to operating system.
          | |   Start Compiler on source module.
          | |   WAIT A LONG TIME FOR THE COMPILER.....
          | |   Discover an error.
          | |
          | --< LOOP back up until all compile errors are found.
          |
          |     Now start Linker on all modules.
          |     WAIT A LONG TIME FOR THE LINKER.....
          |     Discover Link error.
          ----< Go back to beginning and try again.

The above loop could be measured in DAYS, and was normally at
least 30 minutes long.

Forth did away with much of the above.  The editor was integrated
into the Forth/Operating system environment, so the time to start
up or leave the editor was zero.  The compiler was incremental, so
programs could be debugged a piece at a time, and there was no
linker at all.  This naturally resulted in a productivity
improvement and a significant reduction in programmer frustration.

As the years went by, other programmers noticed how much easier
BASIC was to use than other compiled languages, since it had a
built in editor, and didn't have to compile at all. Of course it
was SO SLOW.., but then along came TURBO PASCAL. It created fast
compiled code, had an integrated SCREEN editor, and compiled like
BLAZES.

We now start to see some similarities to Forth, a much superior
development environment, where the development iteration cycle has
been reduced to a very small number.  But Turbo Pascal still
lacked Forth interactivity, and ability to incrementally debug
programs as they are developed.

Finally along came the Macintosh and Light Speed Pascal.  It had
evolved from Mac Pascal, an interactive and pseudo interpreted
Pascal for the Mac.  LSP (Light Speed Pascal) had windows, a
built-in screen editor, compiled modules, a very fast compiler and
a light speed linker, with the ability to test small segments of
code, and two built-in debuggers: one for Pascal, and one for
Assembly.  The only problem was that is was PASCAL not Forth.
However, there are distinct advantages of sequential files.  Here
is a partial list:

                Source files are smaller, so backing or
                transporting file is easier.

                Sequential source files can be manipulated
                or viewed by programs that other people
                have, not just by the forth block editor.

                There is no artificial limitation placed on
                definition size.  In the block based system
                We are always giving up line zero for a
                comment line, and line 15 for nudge space.

                There is no artificial limit placed on the
                amount of comments I can place with the
                source.  Again, compared to blocks with
                shadows, 16 lines of shadows was either too
                much or too little.

                Sequential files provide a much more
                natural interface to the operating system.

                It allows plenty of room for inserting a new
                definition in the middle of a source file,
                without having to drop out of the editor,
                and use MORE and CONVEY to move things
                around, all we have to do is press <enter>.

Hmm.  Wonder what Forth would be like with Sequential files?
Well, it has arrived.

So here we are at the end (or beginning) of a long road, looking
back at what we have done, and looking forward to the future.
Blocks were certainly very useful for forcing us to modularize our
code.  That was a big advantage while we were learning Forth.
Maybe newcomers to Forth should be required to learn the system on
a BLOCK version, but now that we have come of age, we should know
where to modularize our code better than the computer.



2.   THE F-PC SYSTEM



F-PC is a greatly enhanced version of Forth derived from the F83
model for the IBM-PC, XT, or AT by Henry Laxen and Michael Perry.
A major step forward was the F83Y system produced by Wil Baden,
who introduced separated heads and many other features.  Many
people contributed to it, includine Robert L. Smith, Charles
Curley, and Jerry Modrow, but the major work was done by Tom
Zimmer.  Tom was able to totally confuse the Forth community by
releasing many versions of his Forth in the last year, progressing
from DH, HF, PF, SF, FF, and XF, updating his latest version on a
weekly basis.  As his efforts to modify it have tapered off
somewhat in recent months, it is reasonable to assume that the
system have matured and stabilized to the point that it warrants a
serious effort to release it for general usage in the Forth
community.

In order to release this system for public usage, it is necessary
to take it out of Tom's hands so that no more new features are to
be added to the system, except minor fixes of bugs as they are
discovered.  It is also necessary to provide better and more
complete documentation on the system so that a Forth programmer
can pick it up and use the system productively on his own, without
having to have access to Tom for support and consultation.  The
Working Group is organized to serve two very specific purposes: to
do beta testing on the system to flush out as many bugs as
possible in a two to three months period before the formal
releasing, and to provide user and system documentation so that
both application and system Forth programmers can use the system
in isolated (in the Forth sense) geographic locations.

This system was tentatively named F-PC to emphasize the following
attributes:

     1.  It will be released in 1988, encapsulating concepts and
         practices evolved to this point of time.

     2.  It is a derivative work of F83, both in spirit and
         substance, as a public domain Forth system to encourage
         experimentation and commercial product development using
         Forth.

     3.  It is specifically designed around the segmented
         architecture of Intel 8088 series of CPU's in the MS-DOS
         environment.

F-PC is NOT meant to support any standard other than Forth 83-
Standard.  If the concepts and techniques used in F-PC had any
influence on the standard currently being formulated by the ANSI
Forth Standards Committee, it would be totally accidental.



3.   F-PC WORKING GROUP



The Working Group was very loosely organized in the Silicon Valley
FIG Chapter, during the chapter meeting at April 23, 1988.  All
interested people are invited to join and contribute.  People not
living in the San Francisco Bay Area may use the GEnie system to
participate.  The goal is to release F-PC in July.  The Silicon
Valley FIG Chapter kindly permitted the Working Group to use the
morning FORML sessions in May and June to discuss and work on F-PC.
Dr. C. H. Ting will serve as the focus of this Group to coordinate
the efforts in documentation.  Bug reports, suggestions, and
recommendation will be collected and forwarded to Tom Zimmer for
consideration.

In the May 28 FORML session, we will discuss the system aspects of
F-PC, concentrating in the KERNEL files.  In the June 25 FORML
session, we will discuss utilities.  If things worked out by
themselves, we should have F-PC Version 1.0 to be distributed in
the July 23 FIG meeting, hopefully with documentation.

To participate in the Working Group, you should get a copy of
Tom's system.  XF is the closest to F-PC, but FF or HF are adequate
for familiarization and testing.  F-PC is available from the SVFIG
Disk Librarian, Dave Jaccuzi, (408)              , or on GEnie
network.  We need to produce two documents: a User's Manual and a
Systems Manual.  The User's Manual contains the installation and
booting procedures, editing, loading, debugging and top level
utility words for general programming practices.  The Systems
Manual will deal with the problems on memory segmentation, file
access, DOS interface, floating point, and other advanced topics.
There are already a great amount of documentation included in the
F-PC system.  What we have to do is to go through all the source
and text files and consolidate the information into a form co-
readable by the machine and the programmer.



4.   DOCUMENTATION TASKS



Dr. Ting will try to organize the existing tutorial materials to
form the User's Manual.  The preliminary version will be
distributed in the May FORML meeting.  Members of the Working
Group should pick one or more source/help files of your own
interests and try to build a section for either the User's Manual
or the Systems Manual.  Currently, the help files are mostly
glossaries of words defined in the source file.  They should be
expanded to include the following information:

     1.   Description of top level utility words.

     2.   Examples of their usage or simple test code.

     3.   Implementation specifics, restrictions, and other
          information.

     4.   Glossary.

F-PC was fairly well modularized into small files, which can be
understood and documented easily.  We hope that the expanded help
files can be collected and organized into a systems manual with
minimal editorial efforts.  Nevertheless, documentation is still a
very formidable task because there are currently about 1990 words
defined in F-PC, making it one of the biggest Forth systems.

Contributions in listings or on floppy disks for the F-PC
documentation should be sent to Dr. Ting, 156 14th Ave., San
Mateo, CA  94402, [phone],  for including in the manuals.



CONTENTS


I.   Introduction                  INTROD.DOC

2.   F83 Compatibility             COMPATIB.DOC

3.   Tools                         TOOLS.DOC

4.   SED, the Editor               EDITOR.DOC

5.   Sequential Files              SEQFILES.DOC

6.   Extended Memory               MEMORY.DOC

7.   DOS Interface                 DOSINTFC.DOC

8.   PASM, the F-PC Assembler      ASSEMBLY.DOC

9.   Miscellaneous Utilities       MISCELL.DOC