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The standard Forth text interpreter recognizes the following types of tokens: words in the dictionary, integer numbers, and floating point numbers. Defining new types of tokens isn’t yet standardized. Gforth provides recognizers to make the text interpreter extensible as well.
Recognizers take a string and return some data and a “table” for
interpreting that data. Gforth implements that table as xt (which means
any xt is a valid result of a recognizer), but other Forth systems can
implement it as actual table, with three xts inside. The first xt is
the interpretation/run-time xt, it performs the interpretation semantics
on the data (usually, this means it just leaves the data on the stack).
The second xt performs the compilation semantics, it gets the data and
the run-time semantics xt. The third xt perfoms the postpone semantics,
it also gets the data and the run-time semantics xt. You can use
post,
to postpone the run-time xt.
Recognizers are organized as stack, so you can arrange the sequence of recognizers in the same way as the vocabulary stack.
notfound
( ) unknown “notfound”
If a recognizer fails, it returns notfound
rec-nt
( addr u – nt recognized-nt | notfound ) unknown “rec-nt”
recognize a name token
rec-num
( addr u – n/d table | notfound ) unknown “rec-num”
converts a number to a single/double integer
rec-float
( addr u – r recognized-float | notfound ) unknown “rec-float”
recognize floating point numbers
rec-string
( addr u – addr u’ r:string | rectype-null ) unknown “rec-string”
Convert strings enclosed in double quotes into string literals,
escapes are treated as in S\"
.
rec-to
( addr u – xt r:to | rectype-null ) unknown “rec-to”
words prefixed with ->
are treated as if preceeded by
TO
or IS
, with +>
as +TO
and with
'>
as ADDR
.
rec-tick
( addr u – xt rectype-num | rectype-null ) unknown “rec-tick”
words prefixed with `
return their xt.
Example: `dup
gives the xt of dup
rec-dtick
( addr u – nt rectype-num | rectype-null ) unknown “rec-dtick”
words prefixed with ``
return their nt.
Example: ``S"
gives the nt of S"
rec-body
( addr u – xt recognized-tick | recognized-null ) unknown “rec-body”
words bracketed with '<'
'>'
return their body.
Example: <dup>
gives the body of dup
get-recognizers
( – xt1 .. xtn n ) unknown “get-recognizers”
push the content on the recognizer stack
set-recognizers
( xt1 .. xtn n ) unknown “set-recognizers”
set the recognizer stack from content on the stack
recognize
( addr u rec-addr – ... rectype ) unknown “recognize”
apply a recognizer stack to a string, delivering a token
rec-sequence:
( x1 .. xn n "name" – ) unknown “rec-sequence:”
forth-recognize
( ) unknown “forth-recognize”
Previous: Interpreter Directives, Up: The Text Interpreter [Contents][Index]