[The twelfth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ]   It’s been quite fun playing with this Universal Machine from the Cult of the Bound Variable . In this post we’re going to continue the journey toward building a full Forth for this machine by assembling a Forth inner interpreter;...

[The eleventh in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] If you think coding with punch cards is old school, you should try using sandstone tablets! Legend has it that members of the Cult of the Bound Variable designed and may have even constructed a city-sized machine powered by falling...

[The tenth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] This post may not quite be deserving of a wizard’s cape and 2001 Space Odyssey background music as when Sussman writes out Lisp in Lisp (at 34:34 - my absolute favorite SICP lecture by the way), but still… we are about to...

Some may call it “pointless”, but I absolutely love the point-free tacit programming style . The level of brevity can be truly astounding! Some of the terseness comes from not having to mention parameter names all over the place and much of it comes from the relentless factoring that this...

[The ninth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] The dictionary we have at the moment is split across two worlds. The definitions are in Forth-world; packed into plain memory. But we still have the F#-world mapping of WordRecord s to those memory locations. let mutable dict = [] ...

[The eighth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] They say that the inner interpreter is the heart of Forth and outer interpreter is the soul. It’s time to give TransForth a heart transplant! To really understand what we’re doing here, I’d suggest watching my...

[The seventh in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] At this point we have a reasonably complete Forth that’s pretty fun to play with. Like I said in the first post though, we don’t just want to build a Forth in F#. Stopping here wouldn’t be in keeping with “Forth...

[The sixth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] There’s beginning to be more Forth than F# in these posts! The last major piece we’re missing in the language, aside from some compile-time trickery we’ll get into later, is the standard Forth looping constructs. We’re...

[The fifth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] Sadly (or happily), we’ve come to a point at which we need to begin thinking like an assembly programmer in order to appreciate the mechanics of Forth’s control flow words. We’ll start by implementing IF …...

[The fourth in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] We’re getting very close to the point at which we’ll need to start moving closer to the machine with things like direct memory access. Implementing IF / ELSE / THEN , which we’ll do in the next post, will practically...

[The third in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] Now that we have Forth hobbling along, we can start to peel away the scaffolding. Some of the things we’ve defined in F# can now be redefined in Forth instead. As we go along, I think you’ll be amazed by just how little it...

[The second in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] In the last post we completed the tokenizer/parser and the REPL along with some baked in primitives. We now want to be able to add to the dictionary of known words from within Forth itself; to build secondary new words that are essentially...

[The first in a series of posts on the evolution of TransForth ] I’ve been enthralled by retro computing recently and have been filling my bookshelf [yes, actual bound paper books] with (nearly) extinct programming language topics: Lisp, Fortran, Smalltalk, APL, Forth, … About this time...