STOIC

STOIC (Stack-Oriented Interactive Compiler) was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, (part of the Health, Science and Technology Division) and was written in February 1977 by Jonathan Sachs. [Documentation for the STOIC release in 1977Fact|date=November 2007] Jonathan Sachs went on to be a co-founder of Lotus and wrote Lotus 123. [ confirmed by Jonathan Sachs by Email, 26 Nov 2007Fact|date=November 2007]

The original version was written on a NOVA minicomputer and cross-assembled for the 8080. STOIC came with its own primitive but effective file system, and could be booted up with little preliminary work on any 8080-based microprocessor with 24K of memory and a teletype. After the source was released into the public domain, the system was subsequently modified to run under CP/M.Fact|date=November 2007

STOIC was said at the time [Notes from the original CP/M Users Group ReleaseFact|date=November 2007] 'to be conceptually similar to FORTH in the use of an extensible vocabulary of words'. [quoted in CPMUGUK, the Journal of the UK CP/M Users Group Nov 1980Fact|date=November 2007] . STOIC is actually a rational, and more consistent, dialect of FORTH. The system was remarkable at the time for having a built-in assembler, floating-point package, interrupt handler, and display editor (similar to the NOVA display editor). [from the Documentation for Stoic, Feb 1977Fact|date=November 2007] The source, and documentation, was distributed for many years by the CP/M Users Group. [cite web |url=http://www.nelsonit.net/~jon/info-cpm/1984/04/03/190206.html |author=Hirst.rx |title=Another File from England |date=April 3, 1984 |accessdate=2007-11-26 ] . As a practical development system, it compared favourably with contemporary implementations of FORTH, [Go Forth, be STOIC, in the Journal of the UK CP/M User Group Nov 1980Fact|date=November 2007] and went on to be used extensively for the development of applications. A portable version written in C was placed in the public domain and also distributed by the CP/M Users Group (UK)

Later it was ported to the DEC VAX under VMS by Roger Hauck [cite web
url=http://www.boston.com/news/globe/obituaries/articles/2004/05/07/roger_hauck_65_designed_software_for_space_program/
title=Roger Hauck, 65; designed software for space program
author=Andrea Levene
publisher=Boston Globe
date=May 7, 2004] at Smithsonian Institution Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and was distributed by DECUS. [cite web
url=http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/family-tree/postings
title=Re: Forth family tree (was: The future of Forth)
author=Michael Coughlin
publisher=comp.lang.forth newsgroup] [cite web
url=http://www.taygeta.com/until/untilac.html
title=UNTIL Reference Guide
date=July 1, 1995] It was distributed at least through fall 1985. [cite web
url=http://mvb.saic.com/freeware/vax88b5/rcaf88/decusindex/catalog.dat
title=VAX-SPLIB-1 – The Special VAX Library Collection 1
date=1988/1989]

STOIC, unlike other FORTH variants, was integrated with the VMS I/O and system services rather than using the FORTH disk I/O. It also supported machine code (both inline and subroutine calls). STOIC supported double precision floating point operations using a stack.

Related programs

According to some mailing list comments, [cite web
url=http://www.groupsrv.com/computers/about30945.html
title=The future of Forth
date=Jun 26, 2004
author=John Doty
coauthors=Michael Coughlin
publisher=comp.lang.forth newsgroup] ,STOIC was originally written by Jonathan Sachs in 1975.A different program named "LSE" was written by Robert Goeke, which incorporated some of the ideas of STOIC (and early versions may have been called "STOIC").

An autotooled variant of LSE, [http://www.noqsi.com/images/lse64-0.3.zip LSE64] , is maintained by John Doty.

ee also

*Red (text editor)

Notes