FORTH language interpreter for J2ME / MIDP1.0

tazzix — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 03:01:33 +0000

During my shot at a master’s degree in Software Engineering, I was to select an unconventional language to write and present a report on. I came up with Lua and modula but they were taken before my turn, so I searched and found FORTH. This discovery proved very fruitful because I came to know of a language which could extend itself, never really imaginable to me earlier. But obviously if a turing machine could read its program from a tape then why not…?

Anyways, I learned a lot during the research report and wanted to use this language more often. At the time I had a Nokia 3650 phone which could use a Palm (ThinkOutside) Infra-red keyboard using a special driver. Which was an ideal setup to just start forthing away anywhere at all, hence, I started looking for a Forth interpreter which could run on this phone, but could not find any. I had written some J2ME APIs (specially floating point emulation on MIDP1.0) so my next target was to find a Java based Forth interpreter implemented as a standalone class so that I can wrap it up into a J2ME Midlet of my own.

I stumbled across SFI Forth and achieved the goal, the official page also hosts a download link for my version. And for Spanish? readers. It has no file or RMS persistence support but I have not been using it on better phones now, even though I have plans to enhance it a little whenever I have some time.

In the picture below you can see the setup in action, click to see a larger version.

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FORTH language interpreter for J2ME / MIDP1.0