SuperForth for the Tatung Einstein

Coming Soon

This course has not been written yet. There are no lessons to read at the moment. When the first sections are ready they will appear here, and we will say so in the news.

If you would like to be told when it opens, the newsletter signup at the foot of any page is the place to do it.

What It Will Be

Forth is unlike anything else on the Einstein. You do not write programs so much as extend the language: you define new words in terms of the words that already exist, and the vocabulary grows until the problem is easy to say. It is small, fast and famously strange to meet for the first time, and it sits much closer to the machine than BASIC does.

The Einstein's version signs on as Z80A Einstein SuperFORTH 1.12, copyright 1984 Peter Amey. It is a substantial package rather than a bare interpreter: alongside the interpreter itself, the disc carries a 40 column and an 80 column editor, and extensions for graphics, sprites, sound, floating point and the function keys.

The course will follow the shape of our Dr Logo course rather than the assembly one: a series of small self contained programs, each showing one thing clearly, so that stopping part way still leaves you with things that work.

How It Will Be Made

The same way as the other two. Forth is an old language with many dialects, and SuperForth on the Einstein is its own specific product. So nothing will be taken from another Forth, from a general tutorial, or from the manual alone without first running it on the machine and watching what happens. Where a source and the machine disagree, the machine wins, and the experiment that settled it is kept alongside the course.

The software is already in the library as SuperForth 1.12, and the original manual is archived as the Super Forth manual.