So I was joking around with Jackson a few weeks ago when we were having GAC difficulties and suggested that he’d rewrite the GAC in FORTH. He said he would if I could find a .NET FORTH compiler. Delta Forth .NET is a shareware FORTH compiler for .NET so I downloaded it and tried it.

Running Mono 1.0 Beta 1 on MacOS X (I am sure it works on Linux too), I can:

• Run the compiler.exe that’s included without having to recompile anything
• Launch the FORTH ’shell’ mode
• Run any of the compiled samples that I found
• Compile any of the samples with the FORTH compiler
• build the compiler from source (mcs *.cs /out:Forth.exe)

I had to install Delta Forth on Windows first and copy the files over, the installer is not a .NET app

I haven’t tried to call any external DLL from a FORTH application or call forth ‘classes’ (!??!!?) from a C# application, this is left as an exercise for you, reader.

I know that’s really kind of dorky. But FORTH was actually the first programming language I learnt as a kid.

Nobody can eat fifty eggs

But Jackson sure is going to try.

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These days it’s all about Mono in the press. Mono this, Mono that. When is it going to be about me ? I want to talk about meeeeeeeee.

Get ready, little lady. Hell is coming to breakfast.

I have developed a custom programming language. At compile time I must determine the available assemblies and link against them. I should be able to do this in a portable manner so my compiler can be run on both Mono and MS .NET. [More...]

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I am afraid that my blog is becoming the entry to skip over in Monologue. Oh well.

More good press about Mono that includes some great quotes from Microsoft and some very interesting views on Microsoft’s commitment to .NET and its share-source license. Way to get people confused !

I can do anything I want. And so can you.

I installed Mono on an AMD64 machine today, directly from the Suse 9.1 RPMs that Duncan had built for Beta 1. It just works.

Donnie: My parents didn’t get me what I wanted for Christmas.
Dr. Lilian Thurman: What did you want?
Donnie: Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Dr. Lilian Thurman: And how did you feel, being denied these hungry, hungry hippos?
Donnie: Regret.

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Nothing should surprise me anymore but this morning I didn’t quite expect to read an article about Mono 1.0 Beta 1 that started with :

“On May 5, 1862, 4,000 Mexican loyalists defeated 8,000 French and revolting Mexican troops in the Battle of Puebla, an event celebrated around the world as Cinco de Mayo. Novell has chosen this day to release the first beta of Mono 1.0, an open source alternative to Microsoft’s .Net framework.”
– Mono project achieves beta release, invites developer input, LinuxDevices.com

Isn’t it funny in this context ?

¡ Viva Mexico !

We’re going streaking.

Just a Post Scriptum really. Testing iKVM using the Mono 1.0 Beta 1 distributions, Cameron and I tried running Eclipse 2.1.3. After staring blankly at a binary file called eclipse for a few hours, we typed:

ikvm -cp startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86

and it worked.

Just for those who haven’t followed up on the excellent IKVM.NET, it allows you to run any java application on a .NET implementation (such as Mono) as well as statically compile Java libraries into .NET assemblies. So basically we ran Eclipse (a large Java app) on top of IKVM.NET without any Sun or IBM Java VM involved.

I could try it on MacOS X but I don’t want to.

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