FTH Forth Scripting

• Download from Sourceforge
• Interpreter Documentation
• Library Documentation

About FTH

Fth is a BSD licensed free software package which includes the interpreter fth and the extension library libfth. You can use Fth as a command line interpreter like Awk, Perl, or Ruby, you can write Forth scripts, use the repl for interactive input or you can link libfth into an application using Fth as extension language.

Fth's core language is Ficl, Forth-inspired command language, written by John Sadler . The manipulated Ficl source is included in Fth's source tree. The original Ficl source is slightly modified because of Fth' special needs. The interactive Fth interpreter supports tcsh-like comman-line editing with the Tecla library.

Fth has the following ANS Forth labels:

Fth' double word set doesn't eat two stack entries and the so called double word numbers are actually ficl2Integers. An extra float stack doesn't exist.

The Fth library contains object type extensions, for example arrays, hashs, strings, regexp and others. A garbage collector handles the memory management of object types.

You can get the latest fth-1.3.2.tar.bz2 from http://sourceforge.net/projects/fth/ . If you prefer anonymous CVS, you can check out the sources with:

% mkdir ~/src
% cd ~/src
% cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@fth.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fth co -P fth


The directory ~/src/fth contains the source tree; update it with:

% cd ~/src/fth
% cvs update -dP


The -d option creates and the -P option prunes empyt directories. One can write CVS options to ~/.cvsrc:

% cat ~/.cvsrc
update -dP


The commands above are reduced to:

% cd ~/src/fth
% cvs update


Happy Forthing!