Charles Childers @crc@mastodon.social
Programmer. Developer of Retro Forth, Gopher servers and clients, and several iOS apps. Co-founder DC Comtech.
Joined Sep 2017
Charles Childers
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Charles Childers
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@djsundog In all honesty, Masto/Fediverse is the last social media network I plan to participate in. If I need to make a statement and "thought-leader," then I'll just go back to long-form blogging.
Charles Childers
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Looking at my logs... my gopher server gets traffic, my http server lives only for bots and people looking for exploits. This knowledge is satisfying. Long live port 70!
Charles Childers
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GNU/Forth 1.0 is near
Charles Childers
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So, the #Forth community lost another member recently. RIP Bill Muench. Along with Dr. Chen Ting, he wrote the first versions of eForth.
I sometimes wonder to myself, if, when I die, will I be the last person using Forth?
π’
New phlog post on #retro with some musings concerning FFI. http://forthworks.com/phlog/posts/20190904 and gopher://forthworks.com/0/phlog/posts/20190904
A #retro #forth update for macOS is out with the latest changes.
Grab the .dmg at http://www.forthworks.com/retro/download/MacRetro-2019.8.dmg.zip or from the app store at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/retro-forth/id1317494014?ls=1&mt=12 (This is the editor based system, not the terminal version, the terminal version can be built from the standard sources)
The version in the FreeBSD ports tree is also up to date now. My pkgsrc is broken, so an update for that is on hold until I can fix it.
Retro #Forth 2019.7 is now released.
Source Code: http://forthworks.com/retro/r/RETRO12-2019.7.tar.gz or gopher://forthworks.com/9/retro/r/RETRO12-2019.7.tar.gz
New binaries for macOS and Windows will be built from this later in the week.
Of the changes, the most notable ones are improvements to portability and building, and the addition of a sockets interface.
Release Notes: http://forth.works/141c88d2807565965798d473cc7acf48 or
gopher://forth.works/0/141c88d2807565965798d473cc7acf48
The iOS version is also updated: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/retro-forth-12/id1170943580?ls=1
After a couple of evenings, 7080 is working. This is a little gopher-via-http proxy. Not done, but functional for text and directories.
I'm starting work to remove the use of curl this weekend (will be testing a version using the socket words in RETRO), and will then clean everything up before adding support for binary files.
http://forth.works/8754136193a15a4a140518d09d1cc028 or
gopher://forth.works/0/8754136193a15a4a140518d09d1cc028
http://forth.works/examples/7080.forth.html is syntax colorized version.
Charles Childers
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I've created a github repo for "f68k", an Forth 83 System for m68k computer (Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL and OS-9). I've merged back the Amiga and Atari ST files.
This Forth system is the ancestor of f68kans, an ANS-Forth version of the same system:
Finished with my #gopherdon updates. Now starting on a new project: a #gopher to http gateway and proxy server.
Charles Childers
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Chuck Moore has gone on record saying, "Too many people like to play games with their compilers, and don't spend enough time writing applications." He's right. Writing your own Forth interpreter is a nice goal to achieve for oneself; however, it shouldn't encompass the totality of your Forth coding experience. This is one of the reasons why I researched ascetic programming: to help explain what real-world app dev in Forth should or could be.
Progress so far: the timeline is now a directory, it's more readable, links are extracted and selectable, better formatting of html into text. #gopherdon
Testing some updates to gopherdon, my mastodon via gopher client.
Working on documentation for #retro #forth. Current state: gopher://forth.works:70/1/handbook or http://forth.works/book.html . Any feedback would me appreciated.
I should be able to wrap up an update to my ios gopher client this weekend. (I found a few small issues in the latest tests, mostly involving working around the notched display on newer devices. The other bug fixes and support for saving text and images to Files are done).
After 12 years, I'm getting back into OS development with #Retro #Forth.
Using my standard VM and image, with a few new words to allow access to physical RAM and I/O ports, I now have a functional system with text display, serial, cmos rtc, & ATA drivers in Forth. The keyboard driver is in assembly, the MISC VM is in C. Boots to the listener, also has a block editor.
It's now as functional as the last x86-assembly version (Retro9, 2007), but with most things actually in Forth this time.
Charles Childers
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Okay friends of port 70, guardians of the gopher, lovers of plaintext and long form content, the process has begun. I am very new to android dev and this is slow going, but enthusiastic to announce start of a new gopher client project for android.
Want to keep things as simple and elegant as possible, but already having tons of cool ideas about functionality.
Charles Childers
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EDA toolchain in one screen of #Forth by Chuck Moore http://www.0xff.in/bin/A_Language_for_Digital_Design.pdf [PDF]
Programmer. Developer of Retro Forth, Gopher servers and clients, and several iOS apps. Co-founder DC Comtech.
Joined Sep 2017
Server run by the main developers of the project 
It is not focused on any particular niche interest - everyone is welcome as long as you follow our code of conduct!