Glypher Beta2F

Overview

Glypher, By Roger Levy.
Roger is no longer supporting Glypher.
He has graciously allowed us to provide the last beta version (2f). We have taken it apon ourselves to provide a history of its development, a discription of the environment, and some examples of coding in this remarkable system.
Roger is currently working on his Forth programming environment for Game-Cube.

A more informal approach here, in comparison to other handbooks found at RetroForth. Let us discover the thing together.

Environment

Glypher is a hybred of ideas. The following is the text from the included "Using_Glypher.txt" file:
Glypher is a Colored Forth with roots in RetroForth.
It is oriented towards visual programming and game development, and runs on the Windows platform.
As a colored Forth, it uses different colors (assigned to function keys) to determine the action to take. It also has a tightly integrated editor.
When Glypher starts, you get a random introduction screen. This is generated by a small program on block 20. You can navigate through the blocks by using ALT+the arrow keys.
Inside a block, use the arrow keys to move around. To delete a word, place the cursor directly after the word and press delete.
To enter a word, type in the word and then press the function key corresponding to the color action you wish to take. Use the normal space bar to simply execute the word.
Use 'save' to save your blocks and 'bye' to quit Glypher. Look around, tweak things, and have fun! If you do anything interesting with it, please feel free to share your results with us.

Color      Use
========================================================================
RED        Define a forth word
ORANGE     Define a macro word
GREY       Compile a Forth word, or execute a macro word, or
           compile a number as a literal. Searches the macro
           dictionary first.
BLUE       Compile a macro word, or have a macro compile a Forth
           when executed
CYAN       Execute forth words only; compile a literal if the next
           word is GREY. Macros will not work here.
MAGENTA    Create a variable inside the source
WHITE      Comments; do nothing
GREEN      Define a string. on GREEN to non-green, the string is
           compiled, EXCEPT when the next color is CYAN, then it
           is placed on the stack.
========================================================================

I have a help file that came with an earlier release of Glypher that contains a word list. I have to go over the list and see what pertains and what remains in the 2f beta before I will post the word list.

History

I have some conversations with Roger that I logged while he was describing the development of Glypher. I may make those available here as a history.

Development

TEMPORARILY FROZEN but on the TODO list is...
Disassemble.
Move basis to a current Rx-core defined ANS compatable RetroForth.
colorForth Mode. I'm halfway there. The display is colorForth but the keyboard is still Glypher. The purpose of colorForth mode is to provide a colorForth trainer. I may wait till the basic engine sits atop a new RetroForth before finshing colorForth mode.