PForth

pForth

Original author(s)	Phil Burk
Developer(s)	Phil Burk
Stable release	2.0.1 [1]   / 9 January 2023;2 years ago (9 January 2023)
Repository	github.com/philburk/pforth
Written in	C
Operating system	Linux, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, WebTV, and embedded systems with no operating system
Size	204  KB
Available in	English, French, Chinese
Type	Programming tool
License	Public domain software
Website	www.softsynth.com/pforth/

pForth(Portable Forth) is a portable implementation of the Forth programming language written in ANSI C. It differs from the other distributions of Forth in that it strives for portability over performance.

The pForth implementation of Forth is an open source programming language.

History

PForth started out as HForth, which was used in connection with the Hierarchical Music Specification Language, a music experimentation language developed by Phil Burk, Larry Polansky and David Rosenboom. Phil Burk ported the HForth kernel to C when he moved to the 3DO company. The newly ported Forth at 3DO had to run on many different systems including SUN, SGI, Macintosh, IBM PC compatibles, Amiga, and the 3DO ARM based Opera system. ^[2]

License

Originally pForth was released to the public domain with a custom release and disclaimer of no warranty but in 2020, it was relicensed under the zero-clause BSD license, which is a public-domain-equivalent license. ^[3]

References

1. "Release v2.0.1".
2. pForth Reference Manual Archived 2009-09-06 at the Wayback Machine
3. "pforth/license.txt at 1f99f95d6a7eecc05cae8fb357f9b7bf564c2725 · philburk/pforth · GitHub". github.com. Retrieved 2025-06-16.

External links

• Official Homepage
• pForth on GitHub
• pForth for Max OS X
• pForth for Debian
• pForth for MVS  : MVS on the IBM System/370 is an EBCDIC platform.