Quartus
Forth Manual
Table
of Contents - Quartus
Forth Home Page - How
to Register
About Quartus Forth
Quartus Forth is an on-board ISO/ANSI Standard Forth
optimizing native-code compiler for the Pilot,
PalmPilot, Palm III, and IBM
WorkPad connected organizers.
"Quartus Forth"
The name "Quartus Forth" is a play on words. When Charles Moore originally
created Forth, he felt it represented an evolutionary step beyond what were
then called third generation languages (such as FORTRAN), and hence he
wanted to name it 'Fourth'. Because of the 5-character limit on the length of
filenames in the computer system he was using, he shortened the name to 'Forth'
instead.
"Quartus" is the Latin word for "fourth".
Features
Quartus Forth gives you a full-featured Forth development environment in the
palm of your hand.
The evaluation
version:
- Full Standard Forth language support, with an ever-growing source
library of extensions for graphics, sound, pen input, event handling,
MemoPad and database access, encryption, and more
- Compilation takes place on-board the Palm device
- Compiles Forth programs directly into optimized 68000 machine language
- Full control over system events and PalmOS GUI resources (forms, buttons,
pop-up lists, etc.)
- Seamless access to over 800 PalmOS functions
- Integrated ROM-independent single-precision floating-point
- Source files can be kept in the MemoPad or in compressed Doc format
- Source files can be nested up to 64 levels deep
- On-board console/interpreter
- Automatic word-wrap and scrolling of text output
- Integrated 68000 symbolic in-line assembler
- Comes with the full source to professional-quality
example applications
The registered version has all of the above features,
plus:
Other good things:
- Quartus Forth is written in hand-coded assembler for optimal performance
- Each release of Quartus Forth is regression-tested
with over 800 functional and unit tests
- Exception handling (CATCH and THROW)
- Full-text messages for all ISO/ANSI Standard exceptions
- Generates fast, tight code
- Compilation speed approximately 1500 generated bytes/second
- Optimizations include:
- Register caching of the top datastack item
- Hashed dictionary lookup with full wordlist support (multiple namespaces)
- Inlining support with automatic inlining of short code sequences and
constants
- Tail-call elimination
- Short branch and literal optimization
- Generated applications can have up to 64K code
segments and 32K data segments
- Locals support; recursion is supported up to 512 levels deep
- Protected memory model eliminates danger of accidentally over-writing other
apps or data
Table
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1998, 1999 Neal Bridges. All
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