oForth from the viewpoint of someone learning the software.

Oforth is an Object-Oriented Forth derivative that seems so far to be a very nice addition to the Forth community in spite of the fact that it deviates from Standard Forth in many of its added features. The new features are well thought out and blend with Forth quite well giving the user added power and making the code more readable which is a common fault of Forth code.

I have been learning a little bit at a time on how to use it, so far it has many advanced features that I like mostly related to Object-Oriented Programming, it’s “block” features are really nice and make the code more readable. Another favorite feature is word overloading which reduces the number of words to be remembered. A nice feature is that one is not forced to use OOP features unless one wants to because conventional features are also available. Another very nice feature is that it generates machine code as its output so in spite of OOP features it can be quite fast.

With modern features such as dynamic allocation of data with Garbage Collection and several added data types, it makes for a nice programming environment for desktop use.

There is one problem and it’s a show stopper, with the latest version of Mint, version 20, oForth is non-functional, the keyboard input does not work. I recompiled the source but it still would not work. I wrote a message in the oForth Forum describing the problem and what I tried but I got zero responses, so support is non-existing, which unfortunately means it is of no use to me.