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--- longforth:start [2024/07/28 06:34] – created gedbadmin
+++ longforth:start [2024/08/26 16:37] (current) – [My Approach] gedbadmin
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-====== A Persistent Version of Forth ======
+====== LongForth - A Persistent Version of Forth ======
 For me, personally, the best way to start learning about the design of persistent virtual machines is to create a working persistent implementation of the [[wp>Forth_(programming_language)|Forth Programming Language]].
@@ Line 16: / Line 16: @@
   * Interactive and Active development
     * Before we had Agile and Refactoring we had [[https://www.forth.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/thinking-forth-color.pdf|Thinking Forth]] by Leo Brodie.  The subtitle says it all: "A Language and Philosophy for Solving Problems."
+  * Progressive Word Definitions
+    * Forth has a feature that I see as important for Plip Plop Programming.  When a word is updated, it does not affect existing words, which will continue to use the version of the word as it was at the time of compilation.  This frees the programmer to change words without having to constantly regression test.
+====== NibbleForth ======
+Rather than working from a specification, I will be using NibbleForth as my model of Forth.  I've chosen NibbleForth because it implements a fully functioning, minimalistic, version of Forth using Python code that is easy to read and understand.
+I have chosen NibbleForth over more compact implementations such as [[https://hackaday.com/2023/11/06/tiny-forth-could-be-the-smallest/|Tiny Forth]] because of this simplicity and clarity of implementation.
+NibbleForth was written by [[https://github.com/benhoyt|Ben Hoyt]] as an experiment on compact code.  The source can be found in his GitHub account: https://github.com/benhoyt/nibbleforth.
+One limitation to NibbleForth is that it does not support Progressive Word Definitions.  It just maintains a dictionary of word definitions as text rather than compiling to execution tokens.  I will need to fix this.
+====== My Approach ======
+I don'st have much spare time to spend on this project, so I need to break the whole think up into neat little chunks.  I expect this to keep my busy until at least the end of 2025.
+The goal is to move as quickly as possible to a SQL driven VM with an debugger API that can be accessed through a web application.
+  - Simple Execution
+    - [[>Step 1a - Execution - Python script and tests|Python script and tests]]
+    - [[>Step 1b - Execution - SQL + PHP version with tests|SQL + PHP version with tests]]
+    - [[>Step 1c - Execution - HTMLX based debugger|HTMLX based debugger]]
+  - Compilation
+    - [[>Step 2a - Compilation - Python script and tests|Python script and tests]]
+    - [[>Step 2b - Compilation - SQL + PHP version with tests|SQL + PHP version with tests]]
+    - [[>Step 2c - Compilation - HTMLX based debugger|HTMLX based debugger]]