Annotations for HP 82441A FORTH/Assembler ROM for HP-71

[rprosperi]

(11-02-2017 06:47 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Thanks, Joe. I copied your notes to my copy of the manual.

I should post my re-writes of some of the Forth words in the module, which dramatically outperform HP's supplied words. In the most extreme case, mine was 13 times as fast, even though I never resorted to assembly language. It will take time to round them up though, and there's already no danger of catching up on my list of things to do.

Please do Garth, as time allows.

I have often read that '71 Forth was quite inefficient (e.g. many of the standard words were bulky when compared to reference Forth samples that were in the literature at the time) though no better ones were published. There were plenty of "missing" words shared in the PPC/CHHU journals, such as VLIST (to display the current vocabulary) - I have found at least 4 of them - but don't recall seeing improved versions of standard vocabulary words.

Don't know how many other active '71 Forth folks are out there (please comment if you are) but I'd like to see them and dabble.