FORTH for the SHARP PC-E500 (S)

[robve]

Forth500 2.0 released

Forth500 2.0 is a standard Forth system for the Sharp PC-E500(S) with 564 built-in Forth words.

Forth500 2.0 runs up to 20% faster by exploiting faster 16-to-20 bit address conversion via the internal RAM registers of the ESR-L CPU.

The NQUEENS calculator benchmark finishes in 3.47 seconds in Forth500 2.0. It took 4.15 seconds in Forth500 1.0. Tested with a loop of 20 NQUEENS runs.

The speed boost should be noticible to colon definition calls (20% less overhead) and also to all Forth primitives involving single and double integer literals, variables, values, constants, single and double integer store and fetch, single integer arithmetic involving addition and subtraction, and single and double integer stack operations.

Improvements are also made to the Forth500 manual and to the Forth500 implementation overall, including new support for Forth vocabularies (yes, finally...)

Also included in Forth500 2.0 is a new text editor "TED". TED.FTH is located in the Forth500 additions folder. With TED you can interactively write, edit and run Forth code in Forth500:

Code:

TEDI MYWORK.FTH ↲
↲                           \ start editing (press enter)
.( TED is great!) ↲        \ a line of Forth (press enter to save)
[CCE]                       \ end editing and read MYWORK.FTH
TED is great!

Synopsis:
TED             edit the last file edited
TED FILE.FTH    edit FILE.FTH
TEDI            edit the last file edited, then read it into Forth500
TEDI FILE.FTH   edit FILE.FTH, then read it into Forth500

Files are saved to the E: or F: RAM disk. See also the TED editor instructions.

By the way, any suggestions for additions, improvements and issues are of course always welcome.

Enjoy!

- Rob