Lacking Natural Simplicity

Retroforth 8

I've been playing a little bit with RetroForth 8 from the daily builds, just under another OS right now, not the native version, and the most useful thing I can say to someone just starting out with RetroForth is to look at the very short tutorial:

$ bin/rf
edit
use lib/tutorial
r

To save any changes, remember to use the w word.

To return to the regular forth interaction style use the exit word.

Here is a page about the RetroEditor (red) at forthfreak (which has a gForth version of the RetroEditor), and a here is a page about RetroForth in general.

Retroforth looks like a good place to get back into forth: it's small and simple, as well as using some of the latest forth thinking: tail calls, simpler control structures, and so forth. And it runs on several operating systems as well as a native operating system itself, so it should be convenient for experimenting.

Stupid Visual SourceSafe

Visual SourceSafe has a command line, but it is incredibly annoying to use. Among other things, it normally truncates its output at 80 characters wide or so, so to use in a script it you have to write the output to a file and then mung that. Of course, the output format for most of the commands is not particularly useful, so you have to mung it up a lot before you can do anything useful.

Recent Viewing

• Zatoichi Jigoku tabi, also known as Blind Swordsman and the Chess Expert, 1965; directed by Kenji Misumi; writing by Daisuke Itô and Kan Shimozawa.