The Sinclair QL Forum

One month ago I published two programs which may be useful to other Forth programmers: Two Forth source preprocessors and converters for Forth systems that need blocks files.

Now I announce them here because I've added support for QL SuperForth.

They allow to edit and mantain a Forth source almost without the limits imposed by blocks. Some simple conventions are used to mark the block headers, and comments that will not be copied to the target format. Empty lines are ignored as well.

There are two independent versions of the tool: fsb is written in VimL (the language of the Vim editor), but it can be used as a command as well. fsb2 is written in Forth for Gforth, and it's much faster (though the difference is remarkable only while converting big files on a slow machine, say the Raspberry Pi 2 in my case). They do basically the same, with some small differences.

The programs are published also on GitHub. More details:

• fsb Forth source converter
• fsb2 Forth source converter

programandala.net wrote: There are two independent versions of the tool: fsb is written in VimL (the language of the Vim editor), but it can be used as a command as well. fsb2 is written in Forth for Gforth, and it's much faster (though the difference is remarkable only while converting big files on a slow machine, say the Raspberry Pi 2 in my case).

I plan to test the converters, just noticed you run PI. I do also use PI, mine is version 1 model B which is mono-core. I read new PI 2 is quad-core, I wonder how much faster I can get with PI 2?

Saludo
Tom

tcat wrote: I do also use PI, mine is version 1 model B which is mono-core. I read new PI 2 is quad-core, I wonder how much faster I can get with PI 2?

I used RPi 1 B for a long time, as my main computer, but one day its HDMI output ceased working. Then I ordered a RPi 2. The speed increase is c. 6x. For example, I usually don't need to watch online videos, but trying it with the RPi 1 was almost impossible. I had do download the videos in very low resolution, with youtube-dl, in order to watch them offline. RPi 2 is powerful enough to play many online videos. Another QL-related example: On RPi 1 it was impossible to run SMSQmulator; on RPi 2 it runs fast enough for useful work.