The FigUK Hall of Fame

This is where you will find FIG UK members who have published on the Web, with pointers to their work.

Honourable Strangers are programmers who are not current FIG UK members, but I couldn't resist mentioning them.

Entries are in purely alphabetical order.  If you think your name should be here let me know

Fred Behringer

Forth for the INMOS Transputer family T80x

This is Forth 83 Standard with most of the ANS Core words also. It supports parallel processing and also multiple Transputers.

Fred retired from his post as Professor at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen. Operations Research (Applied Mathematics) in 1997. He collaborated with Marc Petremann since 1989, resulting in a German version of Turbo Forth.

In charge of "international relations", reviewing Forthwrite, Forth Dimensions, and Het Vijgeblaad for Vierte Dimension, since 1994.

Paul Bennett

Winner of the 1998 Forthwrite award for his series on Reading/Writing the World (Issues 96-98 & 100), Paul has also published a consistent set of coding rules for Forth

Gordon Charlton

Gordon has been, over the years, one of the most prolific contributors to Forthwrite.

StackFlow

An Introductory Tutorial

Heap With Hysteresis

This is an implementation of a heap for dynamic memory allocation using ANS Forth. It provides ALLOCATE, FREE and RESIZE for those systems which lack them using memory provided by ALLOT. The code is designed for efficient operation using high-level Forth and includes several clever optimisations.

Forth String Matcher

Developed by Chris Jakeman from a concept by Gordon (see below)

Jeremy Fowell

Winner of the 1999 Achievement Award.

With help from members, Jeremy has led a successful effort to deliver a low-cost up-to-date Forth-based controller board. He hopes that projects based on this board will be published and used to help members get to grips with Forth in control applications.

Chris Jakeman

The editor of Forthwrite has published two applications:

FoSM

The Forth String Matcher adds pattern-matching to any ANS Forth. A full set of operators for matching are provided and, as the patterns are compiled Forth words, matching is very efficient. As well as validation, FoSM can be used to parse and compile little languages.You can build an infix calculator with FoSM or a convenient language for searching and replacing text. Download FoSM, complete with tutorial text, or read about it in Forthwrite issues 91-93

MAF

MAF is a minimal ANS Forth. It is written as an educational tool for anyone planning to implement a Forth and includes extensive documentation. MAF builds itself from a small kernel of 48 words and provides all the words from the Core word set together with 25 from extension word sets which are used in the building process. MAF is also portable in confining the key decisions, such as dictionary mechanism, cell size etc., to the kernel, which is detachable. The kernel supplied is implemented in ANS Forth (so that MAF is ready to run) and intended to be replaced by an equivalent kernel in Assembler or C. Download MAF

Garry Lancaster

Remember the Cambridge Z88, that extremely light and handy portable created by Clive Sinclair? Garry has written a Forth for it - a port of Brad Rodriguez's Z80 Camel Forth.

"I've made many additions; in particular the following word-sets (and their extensions) from the ANS Standard: Excepion, Facility, File, Block, Search-Order and String. I've also added many useful words from the Core Extension word-set, and several Z88-specific words, allowing it to interface gracefully with the rest of the operating system.

The current version of Z88 CamelForth is v2.28, and includes support for extended memory access via "pools" of up to 64K each. The next version (coming soon) will support the new packages system, and the TCP/IP stack in particular. I'm also looking into the possibility of making CamelForth into a package itself, so application sizes can be reduced by the 16K that the base system takes up. More ambitiously, I may also add the facility to create new Forth-based packages."

Dave Pochin

For those committed to Windows, Dave has written an excellent guide to getting started with the public domain Win32Forth:
 

"This is a highly polished system, well integrated into Windows, and developed from the very popular F-PC for DOS...Wriiting Windows-style programs is never easy, but Win32Forth helps with calls to all the Windows function and object-oriented extensions to help you manage your windows"

Philip Preston

Winner of the 1998 FigUK Achievement Award for his many resourceful contributions to the WebForth project.

The Web Forth Team are engaged in developing and promoting a web-based Forth which can be used across the Internet. This makes Forth accessible to a wider audience than ever before by effectively eliminating the hurdles of downloading and installing.

As a member of the Web Forth Team, Philip has contributed significantly by upgrading the core to be 100% ANS Forth compatible and by enhancing the error-handling and other vital facilities.

Frank Sergeant

Frank has been programming professionally for many years and in a variety of languages, including COBOL, IBM Mainframe assembler, various micro assemblers, BASIC, Pascal, Clipper, C, C++, and Forth. His favorite is Forth. He attended Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 1993 and received his Master's in Computer Science in 1997. He has written a number of articles for Forth Dimensions and The Computer Journal. He is currently doing program development and technical support for the Canyon Medical medical accounting package. He may be best known for his excellent Pygmy Forth (see also the Free Forths page) and has written an implementation of the Kermit file transfer protocol, of which he says:

"...it runs under my Pygmy Forth for DOS (available from my web site), but probably could be adapted easily to other Forths. As the code is broken up into very small subroutines, it might even be of interest for comparison purposes for other languages, providing you read Forth.

The source code is not Public Domain or Shareware, but you may use it freely for any private or commercial purpose provided you do so at your own risk.

This effort makes no attempt to tap the speed potential of Kermit. I wanted to build into my medical accounting application the ability for my customers to upload and download small files, to and from a mainframe, for medical billing/insurance claims purposes. It is working very well for this purpose."

John Tasgal

John is winner of the 2000 Forthwrite Award for his articles (available on-line as a special issue) explaining Chuck Moore's Machine Forth and Color Forth."

Alan Wenham

Winner of the 1999 Forthwrite Award, Alan has published Floating Point for F83

The library was originally written for F-PC by Dr.Ting and has been corrected and converted to F83 and the 80486 processor. It gives 8-9 digits of precision and the source runs to 20 blocks.

For several years, Alan has provided a valuable link to Forth Gesellschaft, the largest FIG in Europe, making their ideas, technology and humour accessible to the rest of us.

Leo Wong

Leo's website has a number of humourous and/or useful Forth source code examples: The Lord's Prayer in Forth, The Towers of Hanoi, Life, Sokoban, "99 Bottles of Beer". Beginners will be particularly interested is his "Inching Forth" (a step-by step introduction) and "0123 Forth" which gives Forth versions of several classic computer science examples: Greatest Common Divisor, Craps, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, the 8 Queens Problem, and many more. "Wong's Rules for Readable Forth" can be found in Edward K. Conklin and Elizabeth D. Rather's Forth Programmer's Handbook (FORTH, Inc., 1997).

Thomas Worthington

Thomas has produced Aztec Forth for Win95:

"The main reason for writing this Forth system was to try to integrate the Windows DLL calls into normal Forth syntax as much as possible, thus simplifying the process of using system calls. It was apparent to me that the structure of the Win32 kernel was well suited to Forth, particularly if the top of the data stack is kept in register EAX. When this is the case the operating system takes the Forth data stack as its inputs and leaves its result at the top of the stack, consuming its input parameters in the process; this is exactly what normal Forth words do.

Additionally, the virtual address space assigned to processes in this operating system means that Forth can treat the addresses returned by GetProcAddress as if they were normal Forth execution tokens and that the OS can treat Forth's data areas as normal parts of its own address space. Therefore no conversion from Forth address space to OS address space is required and the join between Forth and Windows is almost invisible."

More in issue 94 of Forthwrite.

Honourable Strangers

Marcel Hendrix

MANX started its life in 1993 as support software for the Metallophone Project of the Dutch Forth Users Group. The metallophone project -- two relay-driven xylophones controlled by a computer programmed in Forth -- was a big promotional success at a local computer fair. The host computer interpreted specially formatted text files filled with score information. Appropriate output commands actuated relays to generate the wanted notes.

In the months after the fair MANX development continued. The current release 1.0 is not exclusively for metallophones anymore. The program is able to read and write standard MIDI (Musical Instruments Digital Interface) files, with special instrument drivers taking care of I/O details. At this moment MANX has drivers for metallophones, the PC speaker, and GM (General MIDI) synthesizers or soundcards that support MIDI.

The user interface of MANX is the regular Forth environment, enhanced with a number of special purpose music language words. This music language aims to be complete in the sense that a user should be able to translate anything written down in conventional scores to MANX commands. But of course there is more, much, much more...

Julian Noble

Ftran (Formula TRANslator)

Got some formulas expressed in Fortran that you want to use? Julian Noble's utility will translate them into Forth for you.

Brad Rodriguez

Brad Rodriguez is a freelance developer of embedded hardware and software, and a frequent Forth author. His public-domain contributions include CamelForth and the Chromium metacompiler. Brad recently received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

CamelForth

An "educational" implementation of the ANS Forth Core word set, which has found some popularity for embedded systems work. Download versions for 8051, Z80, 6809, or 8086 from the CamelForth web page.

Chromium

The Forth metacompiler which was described in Forth Dimensions, in Brad's three-part series "Fundamentals of Metacompilation." The F83 version was used to produce, and can be downloaded with, 6809 CamelForth.

Moving Forth

Brad's series of eight articles describing how to implement Forth on a new CPU. This series, which originally appeared in The Computer Journal, was the genesis of CamelForth.

More of Brad's writing can be found on his publications page, including "A BNF Parser in Forth," "A Minimal TTL Processor for Architecture Exploration," and "A Survey of Object-Oriented Forths." Professional services are available through T-Recursive Technology.

HOME Site Map TOP