Ficl - small systems scripting with OO / News: Recent posts

At the usual place: http://ficl.sourceforge.net
This is a major revision - thanks to the relentless energy of Larry Hastings. We've been cooking this one up for quite a while now. The centerpiece
of this release is a completely rewritten inner interpreter that runs our benchmarks about 3X faster than ficl 3.x.
There is a revised API with support for compatibility with previous versions, and lots more.... read more

Finally got around to building and packaging ficlwin from ficl303. Now available at ficl.sf.net!

This is primarily a bug fix release. There are extensive revisions to the OO documentation on the website.

Ficl release 3.01 is now available for download at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=24441
Release 3.01 includes contributions and bug fixes.

Thanks to Larry Hastings, we now have most of the optional FILE wordset,
and Larry also did the very nasty task of moving all of those statics into FICL_SYSTEM so that you can create and
destroy FICL_SYSTEMs in whatever order your wicked little heart desires.... read more

The Ficl CVS tree now contains (to the best of my knowledge) the entire tree dating back to Ficl 2.0.

View the tree here: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ficl/

If you're interested in becoming a Ficl developer (it really gets you noticed at parties ;-), please send me your Sourceforge userID and your interests as far as extending the package, and I will set you up with R/W access to the CVS tree.

Ficl release 3.00a is now available for download from ficl.sourceforge.net. This release fixes a problem with OO support in ficl 3.00 and 2.06, and includes tar.gz packaging tested against the sourceforge compile farm.

Please let me know if you encounter problems with any of the packages.

Ficl release 3.00 is now available for download at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=24441

Release 3.00 changes the programming interface to permit multiple Ficl systems to coexist in a single address space. Thanks to Orjan Gustaffson for contributing these mods.

There are also bug fixes for 64 bit compatibility (thanks to DCS (again) and the FreeBSD mob), and fixes for parse steps and debugging

This article summarizes known problems and patches for them in ficl 2.06.

1. Parse steps written in ficl are broken, but precompiled parse steps work as advertised. To fix this problem, replace the guts of the for loop in words.c:interpret() with the following:
FICL_WORD *pFW = pSys->parseList[i];

if (pFW == NULL)
break;

if (pFW->code == parseStepParen)
{
FICL_PARSE_STEP pStep;
pStep = (FICL_PARSE_STEP)(pFW->param->fn);
if ((*pStep)(pVM, si))
return;
}
else
{
stackPushPtr(pVM->pStack, SI_PTR(si));
stackPushUNS(pVM->pStack, SI_COUNT(si));
ficlExecXT(pVM, pFW);
if (stackPopINT(pVM->pStack))
return;
}... read more

Ficl release 2.06 is now available for download at http://ficl.sourceforge.net
The new release fixes a couple of annoying bugs in 2.05, and significantly enhances the debugger. Check it out!
Please join the ficl-announce mailing list at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ficl-announce

About ficl:
Ficl is a lightweight, efficient language designed to be incorporated into other programs, including (especially) firmware based systems. Ficl includes a simple but capable object model that can wrap existing data structures. Applications: scripting, prototyping, automation, hardware test and debug, command language for embedded targets...
Features:
- Written in ANSI C
- Simple to port
- ROMable
- Export C functions to Ficl
- Execute Ficl code from C
- Win32 console port takes less than 100K.
- Can be subsetted for memory constrained systems. ... read more

There are two known bugs in ficl 2.05 at this point - please be aware of them:
1. The implementation of HERE is broken - revert to the version in 2.04:words.c (or see the bugbase for a code snippet)

2. The debugger does not work properly in ficlwin because ficlwin assumes the prompt is "ok>". Easiest workaround is to change tools.c:DebugPrompt to use FICL_PROMPT as the prompt string rather than "debug>"

Ficl version 2.05 is now available for download from ficl.sourceforge.net. The new version includes numerous enhancements to the OO model, floating point support, various win32 enhancements, a port to the Alpha, and more.

About ficl:
Ficl is a lightweight, efficient language designed
to be incorporated into other programs, including
(especially) firmware based systems. Ficl
includes a simple but capable object model that
can wrap existing data structures. Applications:
scripting, prototyping, automation, hardware test
and debug, command language for embedded targets...
Features:
- Written in ANSI C
- Simple to port
- ROMable
- Export C functions to Ficl
- Execute Ficl code from C
- Win32 console port takes less than 100K.
- Can be subsetted for memory constrained systems.... read more

Ficl, the embedded scripting language, is now available on sourceforge under the Lesser GPL.