Welcome to RetroForth

Hello, and welcome to the RetroForth Handbook. This book will hopefully help you learn to use RetroForth and answer most (if not all) of your questions.

What Is RetroForth?

There are plenty of full-featured Forth compilers, e.g. IsForth, BigForth, Win32forth, Gforth, and the commercial forths.

RetroForth [since version 3] is modeled after CMforth, Colorforth, Eforth and Pygmy. It uses some, but not all, of Chuck Moore's newer ideas. It's clean, elegant, and tiny - only about 20k source/10k binary for Linux. It may not have many features, and it may not be particularly useful by itself, but it's easy to grasp, easily adapted to various uses - even on other CPU architectures. I think that's our niche. Tom Novelli

RetroForth is an implementation of Forth for Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, BeOS, and other OSes for the x86 CPU line. It can also be used as a simple operating system.

The design and implementation have been worked on continually over seven years. The current version represents the result of this effort, and we feel that RetroForth provides a clean, solid language for writing truely useful software.