Preforth

A Forth preprocessor written in Forth.

User manual

Usage

preforth <input file> <output file>

This program parse the input file, searching for some tags. If no tags are found at the beginning of a line, the line is copied on the output file. List of tags:

• \ #IN filename : include non-recursively. Dump the content of filename in the output file.
• \ #IR filename : include recursively. Process filename and put the result in the output file. Similar to #include in C preprocessors.
• \ #SI : stop the inclusion. Stop the preprocessing of the file. Useful when used alongside #IR.

Example

Let's imagine we have three files. file1

Some text 1
\ #IN file2
Some text 2
\ #IR file2
Some text 3

file2

Some text 4
\ #IN file3
Some text 5
\ #SI
Some text 6

file3

Some text 7

If you typed ./preforth file1 file4 the content of file4 would be:

Some text 1
Some text 4
\ #IN file3
Some text 5
\ #SI
Some text 6
Some text 2
Some text 4
Some text 7
Some text 5
Some text 3

When we included file2 with the tag #IN the tags #IN and #SI inside of file2 were ignored. But when we included it with #IR they were taken into account.

Compilation and installation

The compilation of preforth will be different depending on your implementation of Forth. I developed it using ciforth so keep that in mind since the result of IO operations might vary from one implementation to another. Since this program only produces a single binary file from a single file the installation will be trivial. With ciforth on Linux I simply do lina -c preforth.frt && sudo mv -f preforth /usr/local/bin to install it.