jonesforth

Your idea for a foundation of practical computing sounds a lot like MIT's 6.004 Computation Structures [1], which is available on OpenCourseWare and edX. In 6.004, you start by learning about the digital abstraction and MOSFETs, then go on to logic gates, flip-flops, pipelining, instruction sets, and halfway through the course you use a circuit simulator to build a RISC processor called the Beta. Then you go on to I/O buses, virtual memory, and interrupts, and at the end of the course you can compile C programs for the Beta. To get from having a processor to having a self-contained programming environment, you could work through a variation on jonesforth [2]. (You'd have to port it from i386 to the Beta if you wanted to keep the same architecture.) [1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu... [2] https://github.com/

This is a more interesting question that it might seem. For a Sunday afternoon read, please take a look to Jonesforth [1] for an implementation of a basic Forth for Linux/32 bits. It's written in literate style and it reads like a nice book. If you are not that interested in the implementation of the compiler (and if so you might be missing the ultimate point of Forth), Starting Forth [2] is a classic resource. Edit: formatting [1] https://github.com/AlexandreAbreu/jonesforth [2] https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/

This is a how-to-write-a-FORTH tutorial that I wrote a few years ago. It's particularly nice that you get to see how various control structures are implemented, like IF, CASE and even comments! Part 1: http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=blob;f=jonesforth... Part 2: http://git.annexia.org/?p=jonesforth.git;a=blob;f=jonesforth... (github mirror: https://github.com/AlexandreAbreu/jonesforth/blob/master/jon... https://github.com/AlexandreAbreu/jonesforth/blob/master/jon...) Previous HN comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187248