Tuesday, May 26, 2009

A ColorForth 2.0 "gotcha".(Windows version anyway)

Hello all.

I pretty much use a Windows version of ColorForth all the time these days. (Usually ColorForth 2.0 from Chuck Moore in Windows mode, but some Roman Pavlyuk's version.). The reason I'm prefacing my remarks is because I have never used the native version of ColorForth 2.0 and I don't know if this "gotcha" only happens under Windows. There is an easily fixable bug that only happens in Roman's Windows version of ColorForth. It uses absolute addressing from blocks as opposed to indirect addressing. So the code:


0 block @


causes it to crash. The fix is easy. Assume the following code in block 162.


ofs 0
foo block ofs 162 block negate + -1 + + ;
block foo ;

Thankfully ColorForth 2.0 for Windows doesn't have that problem. It uses an offset to calculate blocks out of the box. However there is another "gotcha" when using variables. If you try to address a variable using a green word it doesn't work. You may simply not get the results you want or it might crash. Consider the following example taken from Starting Forth chapter 2.


date 0 month 0 year 0
!date date ! month ! year ! ;

5 26 2009 !date


That doesn't get the expected results. But there's a reason I call this a "gotcha" instead of a bug. Long ago Chuck documented that variables really should be used as yellow words (evaluated at compile time) instead of green words (evaluated at run time). When you think about it, this makes sense. A variable is really just an address and for the most part address are constants. So why wait until run time to find the address of a variable? Just find it at compile time and compile the address constant directly into the word. With that in mind the above code becomes:


date 0 month 0 year 0
!date date ! month ! year ! ;

5 26 2009 !date


So if you have old ColorForth code that uses variables as green words you need to change them to yellow words. Your code will be (slightly) faster and it will work on ColorForth 2.0 for Windows (again, I don't know if the native version even has this "gotcha").

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi John -- definitely affects me. Might explain some of the weird behaviour I was seeing trying to work through some ColorForth tutorials.

Thanks!
Dave

June 29, 2009 at 4:15 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks John. Something similar happened to me while working through some ColorForth tutorials and I couldn't figure it out.

Cheers,
Dave

June 29, 2009 at 4:16 PM  

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