Quartus Forth Manual

Table of Contents - Quartus Forth Home Page - How to Register

Glossary of Terms

PRC
The EXE of the Palm world. Executable programs for the Palm end in .PRC, and are installed using the Palm Desktop Software that ships with the Palm device.
ISO/ANSI Forth Standard
The ISO/ANSI Forth Standard was released in 1994. As of 1998, it is up for review. From section 1.1, "Purpose":
"The purpose of this Standard is to promote the portability of Forth programs for use on a wide variety of computing systems, to facilitate the communication of programs, programming techniques, and ideas among Forth programmers, and to serve as a basis for the future evolution of the Forth language."
native code
Machine language; binary instructions that can be directly executed by the CPU (in the case of the Palm, the CPU is a Motorola MC68328 DragonBall processor, a member of the Motorola 68000 family of microprocessors).
source code
The human-readable text of a computer program.
object code
The machine-readable, native-code instruction sequences for a specific program.
interpreter
Reads commands input as text, and takes action depending upon the commands received.
pre-processor
A component of compilers for certain compiled languages (such as C). In those languages, as a first step before compilation, the source is passed through a pre-processor that performs certain text replacements, removes comments, and/or takes other actions based on specially-coded directives entered as part of the source.
compiler
Reads the human readable text of a program, written in programming language, and outputs object code.
optimization
Additional processing during the compilation process that ensures that generated object code is as small and fast as possible.
linker
Links object code and library code into a single, invokable form. Linking is one of the final stages of producing an executable program.
debugger
A system component that provides tools for the developer to use in finding and removing bugs from a program.
assembler
Reads human-readable instructions that have a one-to-one correspondence to native-code machine instructions, and produces object code for a specific CPU.
word
In Forth, definitions are known as words.
 

Table of Contents - Quartus Forth Home Page
© 1998, 1999 Neal Bridges. All rights reserved.