Welcome

[peterjak]

This group was started because I have not found one Forth group that
addresses the real strength of Forth and that is in embedded systems,
particularly microcontrollers. Most groups are bogged down in the
language per se, or are PC centric. The aim here is to aid development
of Forth implementations for a wide variety of micros with the
emphasis on actually doing something practical, much like Forth was
invented not because it evolved out of an academic exercise in a
computer science lab but because of a need to control radio
telescopes. So this forum is more about getting the job done rather
than talking about it.

I have used Forth since the 80's on embedded systems with many
different microcontrollers starting from the 6502 and then Rockwell's
R6511. In fact my first real application was for a POS terminal design
I did, it's amazing how much functionality you can squeeze into 16KB
of EPROM. Plus it was fun learning and making things happen too.

Most of these processors have required that I write my own Forth so
that I could get down to the real task of writing and testing
applications on systems that I have designed. At present I am using
the LPC2148 32-bit ARM7 for some of my projects although I have also
been using the Parallax Propeller multicore microcontroller mostly but
lack a solid embedded Forth for this processor at present.

Some of the CPUs that I have written Forths for are:
6502, 6511
Z80, 8080
8051
65816, M37700
MSP430
LPC2100

Peter