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seven programming languages on one floppy (Developers)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 10.04.2023, 06:57

> BTW, since you are talking about challenges, I remembered
> that I actually have two explicit "university challenges" -
> one for 8086 and one for 80386 at pdos.org. They are both
> 40 MB images currently, but the 8086 used to be 20 MB
> and can be returned to that if necessary (that was more
> realistic back in 1983).
Like I said, I never really learned Forth, but I was fascinated by it for many years. (I didn't even have a PC until 1994, and I was way too young to understand much.)

I found a few copies of F83 Forth v2 for DOS, which was public domain (circa 1984). This was the quasi-standard at the time (after figFORTH or FORTH-79) until ANS Forth '94. (T3XForth is standalone or hosted atop DOS, and it bootstraps with its S86 assembler written in T3X. BTW, DXForth is public domain but uses TASM to bootstrap. Apparently FreeDOS doesn't have the latest version of DX 4.53.)

Since "Forth" usually meant its own "OS", it often used raw blocks to store data (as if in files). But F83 is an executable .COM hosted atop DOS but uses "block files" for sources. Each "screen" is 16 lines of 64 chars totaling 1024 bytes (no CR+LF). It also had a rudimentary line editor. (There's an old 1981 book called Starting Forth online for free nowadays that probably shows better how it was used back then.)

So that's what many people used back in 1984 (and prior). When you think bootstrapping compilers, you usually think Forth.

Oh, what I really found fascinating was that they apparently used their own Forth Huffman compression routines to compress the files back then. Then I found another distribution of F83 v2 where someone was using the at-the-time-ubiquitous SQ (Squeeze) compression which was both smaller and faster (but no sources). Before ARC and PKZIP it was basically LBR+SQ (see Simtel /starter/).

There are also Forths that have their own built-in assembler, and usually they can also meta-compile (headless via turnkey), and rarely there are even compilers to native code (instead of "threaded", which I guess is roughly bytecode).

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