Samuel A. Falvo IIAt long last, much longer than I anticipated, I finally completed the over-the-shoulder illustrative chapter in the Kestrel 3 User's Guide. As I mentioned before, I removed the Machine Language Monitor and STS chapters, since they're no longer relevant now that Forth is in firmware.
Alas, this opens a gaping hole in the user's guide. If anyone can recommend a good Forth tutorial that is small enough to fit in a chapter (roughly 60 printed pages at 8.5"x11") and which is licensed compatibly with the MPLv2 license, I'd be very appreciative. I'd like to provide a narrative in the book, something like chapter 1, installation (done); chapter 2, getting started with Forth (missing); chapter 3, developing an application in Forth (what is chapter 2 now).
Anyway, per my previous log, having completed the book chapter, I'm moving on to drafting the requirements for the Kestrel-3's soft-core CPU. Following the model set forth in the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide, the specifications will appear as a chapter and/or as an appendix in the user's guide, along side its supporting peripheral cores.
Longer term, in between these two types of chapters, will lie chapters on assembly language programming for the RISC-V instruction set architecture. I'm not sure what this (series of?) chapter(s) will look like yet, though.
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Starting Forth is an epic beginners guide. But, it's a whole book unto itself. Still, it should be possible to create a getting started chapter on par with most chapters found in 8-bit computer guides of the day. Those were far from comprehensive as well.
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I have a french pocket book about FORTH.
It's very nice, but FORTH's epicness led me to months of confusion and some headaches as I foolishly tried to make a FORTH interpreter in TurboPascal :-D (no Internet back in the days so I had to make my own SW)
It's a matter of where/when you stop, and say "Please refer to these excellent resources for more in-depth explanations". It will be OK if you mention in the beginning "this is only an overview of the language's concepts, you're embarking on a crazy adventure" :-)
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Well, yes, it is a user's guide, after all. ;-) It's not intended to completely replace a more detailed tutorial. Most people who use the Kestrel will, once the hardware matures enough, simply use it to run simple games, Linux, BSD, or Plan 9. At least, that's my prediction.
I've been thinking about the possibility of renaming the book to Programmer's Reference Guide instead of User's Guide. I don't know what is entailed with doing that though. The most obvious path to doing this would break all previous URLs to the book.
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FORTH is life. It's too hard to summarise it...
Good luck :-)
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