VolksForth Readme

VolksForth is a 16bit Forth System produced by the German Forth Gesellschaft e.V.

Major development of this system was done between 1985 until 1989. The VolksForth Project was revived in 2005 with the goal to produce a managable Forthsystem for computer systems with restricted system resources.

Some modern Forth Systems were influenced by or were derived from VolksForth (GNU-Forth, bigForth).

On most platforms the current version of VolksForth is 3.8x. Versions 3.9.x are interim versions towards compliance with the 2012 Forth standard, and at the same time towards a unification (as far as feasible) of the sources of the different platforms. Also included in 3.9.x versions is the transition from block files to stream files as primary source format, and an introduction of make-based build and test automation. So far the 6502/C64 VolksForth (C64/Plus4/X16) is on a 3.9.x version.

Version 3.8.x is based on the Forth 83 standard, Version 4.00 will be based on the current 2012 Standard (https://forth-standard.org).

At this time VolksForth is available for this Systems:

• VolksForth MS-DOS (Intel x86 architecture i8086/i186/i286/i386/i486 etc)
• VolksForth 6502 (Commodore 64, Commodore Plus 4, Commander X16, Apple 1, Apple ][, Atari XL/XE)
• VolksForth Z80 (CP/M, Schneider CPC)
• VolksForth 68000 (Atari ST, Amiga with EmuTOS)

Copyright

The VolksForth Sources are made available under the terms of the BSD Lizenz - http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

The Handbook is Copyright (c) 1985 - 2020 Forth Gesellschaft e.V. ( Klaus Schleisiek, Ulrich Hoffmann, Bernd Pennemann, Georg Rehfeld, Dietrich Weineck, Carsten Strotmann).

(most of the Information is still in german. We are planning to provide future versions with englisch documentation)

Have fun with VolksForth the VolksForth Team