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I started this project because I like pbForth, but having no previous
experience about coding in Forth I felt the need of a comfortable
environment where to test and debug my programs. I know that a good factored
Forth code needs little if any debugging, but this tool might help some
other Forth newbies like me in feeling more at ease during the steep
learning curve of the language.
I believe that even the most experienced Forth programmer will find some
value in emupbForth, at least for it allows writing and testing pbForth code
even when he/she doesn't have the RCX and the IR Tower handy. Another
feature - the API calls parameters checking - might be as well appreciated
by the experts for its help in discovering trivial but subtle bugs.
The emulator is made of two components:
- A simple visual interface that allows the user to interact with the
sensors and the pushbuttons while the program is running (to simulate
external events), shows the current state of three motors (virtually)
attached to the A, B, and C ports, and emulates the display. This part of
the emulator is a Windows DLL.
- A Forth script which defines all the pbForth specific RCX API words.
To run emupbForth you need a Windows based Forth interpreter. I use
Win32forth, a popular public domain ANSI Forth environment written by Tom
Zimmer and Andrew McKewan. However, there's nothing specific to Win32forth
in my code, so I presume that my definitions are easy to export to any other
Forth systems, provided that it allows for calls to a Windows DLL.
On the DLL side, I wrote it using Delphi (6.0), and made almost no use of
Windows-specific calls and components, thus I expect that the code can be
easily ported to Kylix/Linux (but I might be wrong).
emupbForth is public domain. Port to other platforms or Forth interpreters
is highly encouraged, and will publish any contribution giving full credit
to its authors.
The project is currently hosted at the following address:
http://www.geocities.com/mario.ferrari/emupbforth/emupbforth.html
I consider this page still temporary, mainly because I don't like very much
the name. A warm welcome to suggestions for a less clumsy name than
"emupbForth" :-)
Looking forward to hearing your comments
Mario
FUT: lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth
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