Hierarchical Menus

Volume Number: 3

Issue Number: 10

Column Tag: Forth Forum

Hierarchical Menus from Forth

By Jörg Langowski, MacTutor Editorial Board, Grenoble, France

Feedback dept.

We got some interesting reader’s comments again, so before moving on to the

main topic, I’ll open my mailbox. The first letter comes from Sweden, I got it after

having sent off the September column, and here’s someone who can read thoughts:

“I have used MacForth (level 1), NEON and I am now using MACH2, mainly as

an instrument for trying out assembler subroutines and algorithms.

I found MacForth rather disappointing, it simply hides too much of the Mac

environment and consequently you have to learn far too many special words. That could

also be said of NEON of course, but this was a special case. I found the object oriented

environment quite fascinating. I deliberately use the past tense, I have heard nothing

from Kriya after the launching of the Mac Plus, NEON support seems to have stopped.

MACH on the other hand is an excellent compromise, almost pure Forth, a reasonable

Mac user interface, a very fine assembler and - a disassembler.

That brings me to the actual point of this letter, a suggestion for your MacTutor

column. Dan Weston mentions FKEYs in his fantastic books but only in passing. So, I

wanted to take a look at one of the regular ones in the system file. Lacking Nosy or

anything similar, I opened FKEY 3 with ResEdit and transferred the data to my MACH

editor. The data was then converted to DC.W strings and loaded into MACH. You can see

the result of the disassembly in the enclosed copies. I believe it was worth the trouble,

there seems to be quite a bit of interesting code there.

There ought to be a simpler way of doing this however, a small MACH program

should make it easier to peek at code on disk and perhaps even in ROM. I could always

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