Threaded News
Volume Number: 6
Issue Number: 5
Column Tag: Jörg's Folder
By Jörg Langowski, MacTutor Editorial Board
MacForth Plus 4.0; NEON news
And here we are back with a “real” Forth column again. Just in time, it seems;
only when I read on GEnie recently “It is too bad that he was seduced by the dark side of
the force” about my recent excursions into other domains I realized that the true
believers might have been disappointed. But please realize, there is only so much space
in our magazine, and we have to try and cover a great variety of subjects.
A new version of MacForth Plus (v 4.0) has arrived here; with lots of
improvements, notably faster execution and compilation, the possibility to generate
stand-alone code, and some rudimentary but very efficient object-oriented extensions.
Before I tell you more about it, I’d like to show you that there are still some people out
there using NEON, and improving it. I received the following note from a reader in
Australia:
“Dear Jörg,
I was delighted to read in your October column in MacTutor, that some people are
still using NEON. I thought I was the only one! I enclose a copy of a letter I have sent to
Bob Loewenstein, for your interest.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Hore
5/137 Elouera Rd.
Cronulla, NSW 2230, Australia”.
The copy of Mike’s letter follows:
“Dear Bob,
I’ve just read your comments on NEON in the October issue of MacTutor ( which
takes a while to arrive on the newsstands here). I was amazed (and delighted) to see
that there are still a number of folks using NEON - I thought I might be the only one! I
have always thought that this was the most underrated development system for the Mac.
A good product with potential to be a great one, but torpedoed by a marketing strategy
which bordered on the nonexistent.
I also found no problem running on a Mac II - my personal finances don’t run to
Referenced by (2):