March 2, 1991 36139 Chelsea Drive Newark, CA 94560 Frank C. Sergeant 809 W. San Antonio Street San Marcos, TX 78666 Dear Frank, Having downloaded PRE-PYG, WHYPYGMY, and PYGMY13 from GEnie, read your comments and played with the program, I have the inspiration to write this letter. Let me start with a selection from Kent Peterson's HAIKU.COM: the lingering fog hides a weathered withered dream struggles an ancient bird That is me. I have been a novice at Forth since about May of 1990 and a novice at computers from about the time we bought an Apple IIc, if you don't count punching IBM cards for an engineering college course assignment in the early sixties. I have a full time job designing overhead electric cranes, but that did not directly connect me with Forth. I don't remember when I first heard the name Forth. It may have been in connection with the Titanic discovery, or subliminally through a McGraw-Hill course in programming which I subscribed to, but for which I have to give myself an incomplete grade. My interest in Forth was first aroused by a little biographical sketch under the picture of a smiling young fellow whose book I happened to have opened at our local library. It said that this fellow liked old Volvos. That put us on a common ground. Further look showed that he liked to draw cartoons, and that was enough to check out the book. "A picture is worth a thousand words," I have always believed. Well, this book has led me to more books, to SVFIG membership, to a large number of down-loaded or purchased shareware Forth programs, to new friends, even to meeting the creator of this little world, CM himself. But it has also entered me into a sea of troubles and a realization that I may never get through it unless I can find someone to help me out of my canoe of knowledge. How do you trade a canoe for a battleship? If that is not possible, at the least I would like to paddle my Forth canoe in less dangerous waters and not worry about the lingering fog either. Now, I am coming to the first reason for writing to you. I have spent only one or two evenings with PYGMY13 and have actually come to believe that this time the muse of Forth is not trying to send me off to another odyssey of frustrations through strange, unmapped, and - as it might seem to the novice - even muddied waters. I can understand your manual and I like your style. After defining : CONDENSED 27 EMIT 15 EMIT for my Epson RX80 clone and after 150 153 LOAD to get the correct 2SCRS, I actually managed to get all 182 screens of source code printed out for myself. And my compliments to Kent Peterson too: the code to his FUNPYG files will definitely add to my learning experiences. The novice needs something to tinker with that actually works and is thoroughly and correctly released to the public. With very few exceptions, such as Dr. Haydon's EAR TRAINING program, running on MVPFORTH which I had to get from him personally, since the GEnie versions had bugs, or Peter Midnight's TOWERS OF HANOI (in Tom Zimmer's F-PC package), I have not come across too many interesting applications that a person of my level can examine and see what makes them tick. I have spent too many hours typing codes in different versions of Forth, using examples from even such good books as "Starting Forth" (both editions) and "The Complete Forth" only to realize that either they have printing errors or the versions of Forth that they work in are not on my disks. I have looked at Jack Brown's and Richard Haskell's tutorials, for F83 as well as for F-PC. They are good, but for one reason or another I have a problem getting started with those Forths. I guess I am really interested in the smallest Forth that obeys me on my 8088. To quote Chick Sale: "It's a mighty sight better to have a little privy over a big hole than a big privy over a little hole." I have dug a whale of a hole and am looking for a small privy that works. Please, Frank, no offense intended here toward anybody. I have been looking at the MINIMAL.COM that is contained in Klaus Schleisiek's VOLKS4TH, as a possible candidate, but I have not managed to translate the German manual yet. Dr. Morgenstern has mentioned PYGMY to me several times, very favorably, and now that I have seen it I want to learn more. I do not want to give up yet for lack of a basic Forth that WORKS and has ALL of the documentation that a BEGINNER needs. One of these days, hopefully, I will even understand the different ways of code-threading and why one would like to decapitate words, but for now I just want to be able to enter the Forth labyrinth with as little as Ariadne's ball of thread. Now that I have gotten that off my mind, I come to the second reason for writing this letter, and that is (the truth): "my check for $25 is in the mail" to your home address. Please, register me and send me the glossary and whatever else comes in the PYGMY 1.3 add-on package. I am going to try to upload this as an open letter to you at GEnie. Perhaps some other novice might want to read it. At any rate, it will give me the experience of sending something; so far I have only received. Thank you. Sincerely, V. Henry Vinerts.