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HP71: Any suggestions to learn FORTH ?
Message #1 Posted by Jos on 7 Mar 2005, 9:53 a.m.

Title says it all. I am a (relative) inexperienced programmer and want to start to use my HP71's FORTH module language environment to do some basic programming. I have the museum discs, my main problem is that I do not seem to be able to take the first hurdle, some questions: - Where can I get (download ) a simple introductory course in FORTH - Overview of programming elements/language structures. - Example programs geared towards the HP71 - etc.

Any help would be very welcome.

Jos

      
Re: HP71: Any suggestions to learn FORTH ?
Message #2 Posted by Raymond Del Tondo on 7 Mar 2005, 10:14 a.m.,
in response to message #1 by Jos

How about google ? A quick search for 'FORTH tutorial' returned various links:

http://astro.pas.rochester.edu/Forth/forth.html

http://home.tampabay.rr.com/jforth/C04_Tutorial_Beginning.html

http://www.pmb.net/documents/forth.html

There are many more, but these should get you started;-)

Even the HP-48 programming manual can be of valuable help,
since RPL is *very* similar to FORTH.
These can be downloaded from HP or www.hpcalc.org

:: DUP SWAP DROP ;

Raymond

      
Re: HP71: Any suggestions to learn FORTH ?
Message #3 Posted by John Pierce on 7 Mar 2005, 12:44 p.m.,
in response to message #1 by Jos

I am also attempting to learn this non-intuitive language. The HP Owner's Manual recommends three references, Brodie's Starting FORTH, FORTH-83 Standard, Haydon's An Annotated FORTH Glossary. I downloaded the FORTH-83 standard from the internet; I bought "used" copies of the two books using Barnes & Nobel, and Amazon. Be careful when buying the used books because the prices ranged from $35.00 to $300.00!!! for the same title in similar condition. I bought each for about $45.00. Also the FORTH Interest Group web-site lists many links to tutorials and different versions of FORTH. I downloaded a copy of Pygmy FORTH for use on my PC. I have been very frustrated while trying to learn FORTH, fortunately I am retired and learning FORTH as a stimulating intellectual exercise. Good Luck !!!

            
Thanks for your feedback !
Message #4 Posted by Jos on 7 Mar 2005, 12:54 p.m.,
in response to message #3 by John Pierce

Thanks to you both, I'll start with the online tutorials.

      
Re: HP71: Any suggestions to learn FORTH ?
Message #5 Posted by Garth Wilson on 7 Mar 2005, 2:57 p.m.,
in response to message #1 by Jos

Starting Forth, by Leo Brodie, is a great book for beginning in Forth. It's very dated, but still excellent in most ways, and humorous. Unfortunately the only versions I've seen online were where apparently someone just re-keyboarded the whole thing, without the pictures, the bold and italics, etc.. The Forth Webring's address is http://t.webring.com/hub?ring=forth . You'll find a lot of good websites linked in there, including tutorials.

That was the book I started into Forth with, with the HP-71. Unfortunately the situation I ran up against was that the book assumed you had something to practice on, and the HP-71 Forth/Assembler module manual assumed you already had experience in Forth and only needed to know the things that were particular to the HP-71. The two were left pointing at each other. It wasn't ideal. In your process of learning, you're welcome to E-mail me with questions. I haven't done any Forth programming on the 71 in quite awhile so I'll probably have to do some review, but it'll be good for me! The 71's Forth implementation is not nearly as good as its BASIC implementation (especially when you include the user groups' LEX-file and other contributions to the BASIC); but since it's Forth, you can make a lot of improvements yourself, even without assembly.

After you get some beginning experience in Forth, another book that's good is Thinking Forth, again by Leo Brodie. He has relicensed this book under the Creative Commons license. Although unlinked to in the main page, you can get a copy of the Thnking Forth book at the following URL:

http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/thinking-forth.pdf

The pictures' quality is not very good, but it's all there, more or less in its original form.

Garth

            
Re: HP71: Any suggestions to learn FORTH ?
Message #6 Posted by Raymond Del Tondo on 7 Mar 2005, 6:08 p.m.,
in response to message #5 by Garth Wilson

Hello Garth,

a small addition:

The link
http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/thinking-forth.pdf

doesn't work this way.
You'll have to go to
http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/
then select a download mirror, and finally download the pdf.

For onscreen viewing, take the 'color' version,
because in this version, you can *see* the hyperlinks;-)

Raymond

                  
Re: HP71: Any suggestions to learn FORTH ?
Message #7 Posted by kim on 10 Mar 2005, 2:14 a.m.,
in response to message #6 by Raymond Del Tondo

I have the original hardbound Brodie (amazon helped me)

But I save it from beeing used when I can

Therefore this stream excited me a lot, I could get a print that was not to be considered brittle...

I tried to do the down load from the sourceforge.net site and got diverted to a slew of mirro host.

I ended up in this domain

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.sourceforge.net/pub/sourceforge/

and I can't seem to find the title under Leo, Brodie, thinking, forth or anything else. I even tried FIG. What do I do wrong here? Any advice?

KimH

                        
Re: HP71: Any suggestions to learn FORTH ?
Message #8 Posted by kim on 10 Mar 2005, 2:34 a.m.,
in response to message #7 by kim

I figured it out - sorry it was too simple.

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