Forth Development tools

[Mark Bresler]

Hi, I have been developing FORTH projects for many years. Presently I am working on a 40 page program with many words. I find myself spending an inordinant amount of time shuffling paper or using a second computer to read words used to build larger words or to find instances where a word is used later in the program.

Is there some development tool that when mousing on a line would point me to:

1) the word definition's page #
2) a list of words using the elementary word and their page #'s

Come to think of it, this might be helpful in languages other than Forth.

Thanks for your time Mark

[RMDumse]

What I've used lately is an editor called ED or ED4W (ED for windown). It's got a very fast search feature, and gives all occurances of the word (the first of course being the definition). This editor has a free 30-day trial and is under $200 for a working copy.

One interesting thing we tried in the past was to run source through Rob Chapman's Timbre translator, and it produced an HTML annotated source. Then openning the source with a browser, you could click on the WORD you were curious about and it took it to that definition. Then you could use the BACK button to return to the spot where it was used. This was a bit more "Forth specific" than a regular editor approach. We haven't finished it to the point where we made a product out of it.