Quartus Forth Manual

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

Quick Start

Installing Quartus Forth

To load the Quartus .PRC executable file into your PalmPilot/WorkPad, first unzip the distribution .zip file. Be sure and choose the 'make directories' option in your unzipping software. Use the Install option in the HotSync Desktop software that ships with the Palm device to transfer the Q4THxxxx.PRC file into the PDA, just as you would install any other Palm program.

Starting Quartus Forth

To start Quartus Forth, tap on its icon from the Application Launcher. After an initial "Quartus initializing workspace..." message, you will see a welcome screen similar to this:

Quartus Forth Welcome screen

The blinking cursor indicates that the system is waiting for your input.

Writing your First Quartus Forth Program

To test your new compiler, type this (where <Return> is a Graffiti return, a single pen stroke from upper-right to lower-left in the Graffiti area):

3 5 + . <Return>

The system will add 3 and 5, and display the result:

3 5 + . 8  ok

Now go to the MemoPad application, and create a new memo. It should look just as shown below. Note that for the memo to be recognized by Quartus Forth as a source file, the first two characters at the top of the memo must be backslash '\' and a single space, followed by the word 'hello'. Check your Palm documentation for how to use Graffiti to make any unfamiliar symbols.

Note also that the spaces between the various words are important. There's a space after the colon, before the period, after the first quote, and before the semi-colon.

Each line must end with a <Return>.

\ hello

: go page ." Hello, World!" ;

go

Compiling and Running your Program

Re-start Quartus Forth by tapping its icon from the Application Launcher. At the prompt, type the following:

include hello <Return>

Quartus Forth will find your file, load and compile it. The screen will clear, and you will see:

Hello, World! ok

Generating a Stand-alone Executable

If you have registered Quartus Forth, you can create a stand-alone executable of your new program. For a new program that you want to distribute to others, you'll need to register a creator ID with 3Com. Since this is just a simple demo, and not a program you'll be distributing, for the moment you can use the dummy creator ID (12345.) shown here.

Update your 'hello' memo so that it looks like this (note that new code is shown in italics). The character at the start of the MakePRC line is an apostrophe ('). The period at the end of 12345. is required.

\ hello

: go page ." Hello, World!" begin key drop again ;

' go 12345. MakePRC Hello

Now start Quartus Forth and include hello again, just as you did before. This time, you'll see

.................... ok

A new program will now be in your Application Launcher, called Hello. This is a stand-alone executable, no run-time required. The next time you HotSync, Hello.PRC will be copied to your c:\pilot\username\backup\ directory.

Tap on the 'Hello' icon and see what it does!


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