C-Forth

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An OS/2 port of Allan Pratt's portable Forth interpreter for DOS that featured a basic interpreted core written in C and the rest of the tool written in Forth. It is often known as Portable Forth especially on DOS and OS/2, but that name should be avoided since it name wise clashes with Portable Forth Environment. It is a fairly slow implementation and although the porter announced that he would add OS/2 specific features they never showed up so not a lot to recommend it over and above the original 1985 DOS version.

On the other hand, at 20k in total it is tiny and still offers the usual Forth interpreter functions like execution tracing, single-stepping through instructions, breakpoint detection and breakpoint stack dumping. It also has a couple of small neat touches that not all Forth implementations have such as saving and automatic restoration environment.

Version

  • v1 - 1994

Prerequisites

  • OS/2 2.0 or higher

Author

  • Allan Pratt (Original author)
  • Kent Cedola (OS/2 port)

License

  • Open/Closed source. The original DOS version is open source with the code in the public domain, however Kent Cedola who ported it to OS/2 did not publish his changes, but since they appear to be absolutely minimal (no OS/2 specific features) you could probably recreate it fairly easily.