nickmabry / forth

An Elixir Forth toy interpreter

Forth

Implement an evaluator for a very simple subset of Forth.

Forth is a stack-based programming language. Implement a very basic evaluator for a small subset of Forth.

Your evaluator has to support the following words:

• +, -, *, / (integer arithmetic)
• DUP, DROP, SWAP, OVER (stack manipulation)

Your evaluator also has to support defining new words using the customary syntax: : word-name definition ;.

To keep things simple the only data type you need to support is signed integers of at least 16 bits size.

You should use the following rules for the syntax: a number is a sequence of one or more (ASCII) digits, a word is a sequence of one or more letters, digits, symbols or punctuation that is not a number. (Forth probably uses slightly different rules, but this is close enough.)

Words are case-insensitive.

Running tests

Execute the tests with:

$ elixir bob_test.exs

(Replace bob_test.exs with the name of the test file.)

Pending tests

In the test suites, all but the first test have been skipped.

Once you get a test passing, you can unskip the next one by commenting out the relevant @tag :pending with a # symbol.

For example:

# @tag :pending
test "shouting" do
  assert Bob.hey("WATCH OUT!") == "Whoa, chill out!"
end

Or, you can enable all the tests by commenting out the ExUnit.configure line in the test suite.

# ExUnit.configure exclude: :pending, trace: true

For more detailed information about the Elixir track, please see the help page.

Submitting Incomplete Solutions

It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.