Review of the book the Arduino controlled by eforth by dr chen-hanson ting published in 2018

written by chen-hanson ting

Late Dr. ting was a chemist turned engineer. he earned a phd in chemistry at the U of Chicago in 1965. taught chemistry in Taiwan until 1975. became a firmware engineer until hI retirement in 2000. he was a forth advocate for more than 50 years, especially a forth called eforth that has been ported to many devices, including the micro chip atmega 328 found on the arduino uno board.

I found this book while searching for forths for the arduino uno boards. the source code and documentation for eforth is available in a lot of places I will put a few links in the show notes.

I believe I mentioned this forth in an earlier hpr where I talked about choosing a forth.

forth interest group https://forth.org

https://wiki.forth-ev.de

https://chochain.github.io (pdf)

When I first encountered dr tings forth for arduino I was interested for one reason, it was easily assembled using avra, the gnu port of the atmel assembler. this was nice because using atmels (now microchips) assemblers on Linux required installing wine and installing wine, in the past, on a 64 bit Slackware meant installing 32 bit libraries to have a multI lib Slackware. ( that not an issue now). assembling the forth code in avra is quick, its only a little bit over 5k in size in the end.

After playing with eforth for a while I became frustrated because I could create new words in the dictionary and the examples ran fine, but nothing persisted across reboot. so I dropped eforth and ended up using flashforth, which is a great, robust full featured forth. I still recommend flashforth if your starting out with forth on a microcontroller its solid software with good documentation.

At the end of last year I thought it would be fun to write my own forth. and after looking into doing that I revisited 328eforth and thought, no how about I fix the problems with eforth on the arduino. so I dug out the book and began reading.

Jones forth port at https://ratfactor.com/nasmjf

The book has 6 parts.

part 1 is dr tings musings on how he ended up creating 328eforth.

part 2 explains installing eforth.

the 3rd part begins exercising the arduino board using forth in the interactive interpreter.

part 4 explains 328eforth implementation and design decisions.

part 5 is the full commented source code of 328eforth and, this is the best part, dr tings explanation of what is going on in the code broken down by functional sections. a gold mine of information!

part 6 conclusions

The last part is his conclusions and examples to learn forth.

This is a great free software project. nothing is hidden. it is accessible to anybody who would take the time to read and dig into the code. its makes assembly language much less dark and foreboding.

I'll finish by reading a couple of paragraphs from dr tings book

dr ting concludes:

People using computers are trained to be slaves. You are taught to push certain buttons, and your are taught to push certain keys. Then, you get employed to push buttons and keys to work as slaves. Computers, programming languages, and operating systems are made complicated to enslave people.

Computers are not complicated beyond comprehension. Programming languages and operating systems do not have to be complicated. If you get a sharp knife, you can be the master of your destination. 328eforth is a sharp knife. Go use it.

The hacker ethos.

The next podcast I produce will cover installing eforth on an arduino board and solving that pesky loss of words between boots problem.