bigforth

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bigFORTH is a fast x86 implementation of the ANS Forth language. It comes with a GUI, MINOS, and an embedded screen and stream file editor. It also works nice with Emacs, using gforth.el from Gforth. It offers a number of nice features, like history, input completion, backtraces, a decompiler, object oriented extensions and so on.

bigFORTH is a native code compiler. bigFORTH is distributed under the GNU General Public license (see COPYING). Please add yourself to the CREDITS file if you change something and redistribute.

You can get the official distributions from

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth.html http://bigforth.sourceforge.net/

If you want to get bigFORTH/MINOS for Linux, get

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth-.tar.bz2

or one of the mirrors at Sourceforge

Get also bigforth-pattern-.tar.bz2 if you want background styles, and bigforth-edata-

To install bigFORTH, unpack all packages into a directory of your choise, cd into the generated subdirectory bigforth- and type in

./configure make make install

the latter with the appropriate rights to write into the install directory. configure accepts the usual options of a GNU autoconf configure, such as --prefix=. Default is /usr/local.

You'll see some ignored errors on the first make, when the compiler tries to backup generated bigFORTH images - these images haven't been generated. You can ignore these errors.

If you want to run MINOS on Windows 2k/XP, get

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth-.exe

or one of the mirrors at Sourceforge

and double-click on that file. This is a self-extracting archive, that installs as other Windows programs.

If you have a Debian system, you can also get

http://bernd-paysan.de/bigforth-.deb

and install it with dpkg.

MINOS consists of two parts: a widget library (also called MINOS), and an editor, the tool to master MINOS, called Theseus. To load MINOS, start "xbigforth" and click on "Theseus" in the "File" menu.

This opens Theseus. To arrange objects, MINOS uses a box&glue model. Each dialog starts with a box (usually a vertical box, vbox, you can change this with the "horizontal" button in the box inspector); add all the widgets you want there. To navigate within the boxes (one box is the current box), use the four cursor buttons in the icon bar, or click on the box.

The top three icons select the editing mode: Text/Code/Name, Cut/Paste and Try. The four icons below change the appending order of new objects: First in the current box, last in the current box, before the current object, after the current object. The three lower icons allow you to load, save and execute the current form. Another "designer open" in the dialog window opens another incarnation of Theseus.

There is a help file, which explains a bit more detailed how to use Theseus. You can view the help with your favourite HTML browser, set the shell variable BROWSER accordingly. Default is "netscape". "kdehelp" works fine, too.

To see some of MINOS features, type "include testwidgets.fs" in the dialog window, or "include gears.m gears open".

More informations about MINOS can be found in the article

http://bernd-paysan.de/minos-eng.ps.gz