Appendix D

QUICK GUIDE FOR 'FORTH' ENTHUSIASTS

Ace FORTH is based on FORTH-79, the principle differences being:
  1. The Ace does not use screens at all. Input and output uses a cassette recorder and stores either a dictionary in its compiled form (lists of compilation addresses) or raw bytes from memory. See SAVE, VERIFY, LOAD, BSAVE, BVERIFY, BLOAD.

  2. The Ace can decompile words as a matter of course - see LIST and EDIT. It can also change already compiled words in the dictionary and adjust all the compilation addresses and pointers - see REDEFINE and LOAD.

  3. There are some facilities for floating point arithmetic - F+, F-, F*, F/, F., FNEGATE, INT, UFLOAT.

  4. DEFINER ... DOES> replaces : ... CREATE ... DOES> for defining new defining words; there is a corresponding pair COMPILER ... RUNS> for defining new compiling words.

  5. There are extra words ASCII, AT, BEEP, CALL, CLS, FAST, IN, INKEY, INVIS, LINE, NUMBER, OUT, PLOT, RETYPE, SLOW, VIS.

  6. Ace FORTH lacks ', +!, -TRAILING, 79-STANDARD, >IN, ?, CMOVE, COMPILE, COUNT, DEPTH, EXPECT, FILL, KEY, MOVE, NOT, STATE, [COMPILE]. Many of these are mentioned in examples (see the Index).





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