Hi Doug,

yes, writing an editor was the 'rite de passage' for Forth programmers. What struck me was how easy it was in FORTH, because everything is right there on the stack. I may have mentioned this already (or not, what's the name of that memory disease? <s>) -- I wrote it as a state machine. This condition, this word, etc. That's one thing I like about Python: being able to put the function out there as an object. No instantiation time, it just fires.

Wow: wrote the FORTH interpreter in Basic. Now that's cool.

Hey, what we need is a FORTH written in Javascript to run on devices and in browsers. Did you keep the code? <s> Hmm... it's been done: http://wiki.forthfreak.net/index.cgi?jsforth Interesting.

Hank

>Hi Hank.
>
>>The book one bought back then, Starting FORTH by Leo Brodie, had just published 3 years before I learned FORTH, in 1981. So you were actually pretty close.
>
>I wasn't far behind: I started learning FORTH in 1983. I hand-typed an assembly listing for the FORTH kernel into my Apple //e, which took a couple of weeks. I then wrote a bunch of FORTH utilities, including an editor so I didn't have to type one line of code at a time. Finally, I wrote a FORTH interpreter in AppleSoft BASIC and published it in Nibble magazine so others could play with it too.
>
>Doug