On Mar 16, 10:08 am, Jonah Thomas <jethom...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> This is an old idea for me. I used to think of an editor that would
> automatically display little lines on each side of each Forth word to
> show something of their stack effects. It would be a programmer
> convenience. I didn't have the skill to make an editor do that under
> MS-DOS, and it looked like a big effort anyway for something that *I*
> didn't need. I thought it would be useful for people who were first
> learning Forth, and it would be useful for people who reject Forth as it
> is because they don't want to hold so much in their heads. So I never
> did it. By the time I could do that with reasonable effort I didn't need
> to.
For people who are first learning Forth, animation is more im****tant
than illustration. A 16-bit sandboxed Forth, showing the text of the
word its executing, the state of the data and return stacks, a memory
peephole, a display of command line input and output ... all of course
inside the Forth that is providing the services ... have it run
showing the movement through the files loaded by the learner, with
controls to increase and reduce the pace, run full speed through to
checkpoints (the beginning and end of each loop construct would be
automatic checkpoints), single step mode, etc.
When you see the language as operations doing things when told, rather
than as RPN operators on preceding text, that's half the hurdle
overcome right there.
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