Index of /src/postforth-3

 Name                    Last modified      Size  Description
 Parent Directory                             -   
 FORTH/                  14-Feb-2007 21:46    -   
 Makefile                25-Aug-2007 09:25  132   
 README.html             12-Feb-2007 18:10  1.6K  
 elf.py                  14-Feb-2007 21:13  3.2K  
 min_pe                  06-Aug-2007 02:47  608   
 pe                      28-Jul-2007 15:41  181   
 pe.c                    28-Jul-2007 13:09   62   
 pe.py                   15-Aug-2007 22:20  9.8K  
 pe.pyc                  03-Aug-2007 14:36  8.1K  
 pf.py                   14-Feb-2007 21:20  3.1K

Putting postforth-1 and postforth-2 on hold while a third, related, idea percolates to consciousness. I've been experimenting in ../postforth-0/experimentation/ with the ELF file format, and building guaranteed-unique entries for each new word. This will totally eliminate the collision problem in postforth-0 (other Forths have this problem too, including colorForth 2001).

The current plan is to write the core of the language in postFORTH itself, and use a Python script to compile it. When the language has reached a certain stage of development, it will then be able to compile itself.

Some ideas are presented here, in no particular order.

Some of the goals: Easy to understand quickly how the system is built and how it runs: transparency. Well commented, self-documenting. Very small core, easy to port. Easy to disassemble/decompile. Good as a student language and for serious applications. Use C operators where possible, to attract C programmers into the Forth fold; Forth operators are no more and no less inscrutable as those of C, so why have two completely different sets of obscure gobbledygook?

Put a back-pointer in front of each block of code to its symbol table entry. That way, even if a word is redefined, its old embodiments can be located. Maybe a version number for each word can be stored there too. I was thinking of storing the elf_hash of each word before the code block too but that would be wasted space; it should be in only one location. Calculating the hash is not an expensive operation, and this might be unnecessary anyway.