JONESFORTH/arm: Porting Richard Jones' FORTH to ARM

Back in 2010 I started porting an x86 FORTH to ARM, mostly to learn ARM assembly. Sadly I never finished the port, I stopped when I felt I had learned enough. Of course I had meant to come back to it eventually, but stuff happened, life got in the way. Now it's 2016 and I am going to try to get back into it. No promises though!

BTW, in the meantime two very interesting ARM-and-FORTH-related things have made an appearance on github.com:

• https://github.com/M2IHP13-admin/JonesForth-arm
• https://github.com/organix/pijFORTHos

I am currently still in the process of cleaning things up, but most of the original JONESFORTH words now seem to work. (I'll rewrite this one more time when I am satisfied enough with the code, until then there's no real README just this mess.)

License

Since the original JONESFORTH is in the Public Domain, I figured I should also put my JONESFORTH/arm port into the Public Domain. And to make sure that works out (with all the appropriate legalese that's way beyond me), I decided to go for this:

To the extent possible under law, Peter H. Froehlich has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to JONESFORTH/arm. This work is published from: United States.

Obviously this only applies to code I have written, so the code in the arm/ directory of the repository. It doesn't apply to the other code I keep around for reference, check each of those directories for their respective license.

Original README (2010)

I need to learn ARM assembly in a hurry, and I figured porting a FORTH might be a decent way to do that. I came across Richard Jones' wonderful FORTH and that's what I settled on:

• http://annexia.org/forth

There seem to be ports to both PowerPC and Motorola 68k already, but no ARM port that I could find:

• http://www.lshift.net/blog/2007/10/04/jonesforth-ported-to-powerpc-and-mac-os-x
• http://www.copypastecode.com/14589/

I've checked all of these into git for my own reference, but the only thing that's actually "mine" is the ARM version. I'll decide on a license at some point too. :-D

Update: I found two more clones of Richard Jones' FORTH, here are the links just for completeness:

• http://code.google.com/p/ruda/source/browse/trunk/jonesforth-macintel.s
• http://subvert-the-dominant-paradigm.net/blog/?p=54