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PROGRAMMING POWER
Palm programming with Quartus Forth
By Mark Lawson
When most people start looking at programming their Palm devices, they think of programming in the C or C++ programming languages. However, there are alternatives for the adventurous or curious, or those like me, who never really got along with C. I've spent the last few weeks looking at doing a project using Quartus Forth, an ANSI compliant, on-board, Forth compiler for Palm devices. It's a strange language by normal standards, but has proven itself well worth the look. In this article I can only really scratch the surface, but I hope to give you a taste for what it can do.
By the way, when we say "onboard", this means you can actually program in Quartus Forth right on your Palm device.
Bits of history
Charles Moore invented Forth. He named it FORTH because, in his mind, it represented the fourth generation of programming languages. So why, you might ask, wasn't it named FOURTH? Was it just that Moore couldn't spell? Actually, the reason gives an interesting insight into computer history. FORTH was so named (without the U) because the operating system Moore was using at the time only supported five characters in file names. Adding the U would have pushed it to a sixth character. And so it because FORTH instead of FOURTH.
Unlike most computer languages of the time, the name FORTH wasn't an acronym. It was its own word. As such, rather than spelling it out in all upper case, FORTH was eventually treated like other proper names and presented as "Forth".
Getting started
Quartus Forth is shareware; the evaluation and registered versions differ in the fact that the registered version allows you to generate stand-alone executable .PRC files that don't require a separate runtime library.
To get started, you'll need to download Quartus Forth either from Quartus or one of the normal Palm download sites (see Product Availability and Resources at the end of this article). The download includes a copy of RsrcEdit for onboard resource creation, which you need to install as well.
Between them the two programs will use under 200kB of memory on your Palm device. You'll also find the library memos in MemoPad archive format, and you'll need to install them, too. More about these memos later in this article.
Here's a nice programming safety hint: As with all Palm programming, if you're not sure what you're doing, install to the POSE (Portable Operating System Environment) emulator on your PC rather developing on your Palm device.
Once installed, you should see a screen such as that in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Here's the Quartus Forth workspace.
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