6809 Forth (was: Sharp PC124x/5x/6x)

From: Dave Dunfield <dave04a_at_dunfield.com>
Date: Fri Aug 27 21:23:11 2004

>You would get the 2 versions that I already have :-). I'd like to see the
>6809 fig forth (I assume it existed, and used the 2 hardware stack
>pointers, etc).

It's not fig, but if you are interested, you can take a look a my tiny little
FORTH implementation for the 6809 - Docs are a bit sparse, sorry - it was done
on a weekend in response to a collegue who had been boasting that he had created
a version of FORTH for the 09 that was faster than any other - I truly enjoyed
the look on his face the next monday morning when his test program ran
significantly faster on mine...

Of course I cheated - my FORTH compiled to directly executable code, which
eliminated the interpreter and chaining through threaded links - this has a bit
of overhead (3 byte JSR instruction instead of 2-byte link address), however it
is offset by the fact that I reduced the header to just the word name (no
difference between word types - everything is "native"), which saved me 16 bytes
(IIRC) over the wordsize in his dictionary. Yes, it uses both hardware stacks.

If you are interested in playing with it, it's available on my museum web site,
in the section on my D6809 homebuilt. The source code is included, and if you want
to try it out, you can run the D6809 emulator, mount the included disk IMAGE,
boot up my CUBIX OS and type FORTH - this will launch a ready to run version of
my itty bitty FORTH (about a 2.5k executable as I recall).

Regards,
Dave



-- 
dave04a (at)    Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot)  Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com             Vintage computing equipment collector.
                http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
Received on Fri Aug 27 2004 - 21:23:11 BST

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