Overview

kForth is a simple Forth programming language and environment. It implements a subset of the ANSI Forth specification, along with some extensions. kForth can serve as a standalone computing environment or its object code may be interfaced to another program to serve as a customizable programming language for that application. In fact, the kForth virtual machine is used to evaluate expressions for the program XYPLOT.

Some of kForth's features are:

• Floating point extensions are implemented to allow numeric/scientific compuation.
  
  
• Low level file access words are implemented. These include OPEN, CLOSE, LSEEK, READ, WRITE, and IOCTL (Linux only). In addition to basic file i/o, these words permit communication with device drivers under Linux, enabling kForth to be used for instrument control and data acquisition. A subset of the ANSI standard file extension words are provided in the form of Forth source code.
  
  
• String manipulation words are provided in the form of Forth source code.
  
  
• kForth performs type checking for operations involving memory addresses. This is a non-standard feature which is intended to help prevent memory access violations (segmentation fault) that occur as a result of programming mistakes. However, it results in lower execution efficiency.

The notation for stack diagrams in this document is as follows:

Installation under Linux

1. As root user, create a directory for kforth under /usr/local/src, e.g.
   
   mkdir /usr/local/src/kforth
   
   and move the archive file kflnx10.tar.gz into this directory,
   
   mv kflnx10.tar.gz /usr/local/src/kforth
   
   
2. Change to the kforth source directory,
   
   cd /usr/local/src/kforth
   
   and extract the source files using the command
   
   tar -zxvf kflnx10.tar.gz
   
   
3. Along with the extracted source files, there will also be a Makefile in the directory. Type
   
   make
   
   to generate the executable. The GNU assembler, C, and C++ compilers must be installed on your system.
   
   
4. The executable, named kforth will be generated. Move the executable to the directory /usr/local/bin in order to put it in a path available to users,
   
   mv kforth /usr/local/bin
   
   
5. Sample source code files are included in the archive. These files have extension .4th. Users may copy the example programs to their own directories.