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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Forth vs C
Message-ID: <2105.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 13 Dec 90 12:34:44 GMT
Organization: String, Scotch tape, and Paperclips.  (in Pgh, PA)
Lines: 36


 Date: 12-08-90 (08:48)              Number: 455 of 483
   To: NMORGENSTERN                  Refer#: NONE
 From: STEVE PALINCSAR                 Read: NO
 Subj: FORTH VS C                    Status: PUBLIC MESSAGE
 Conf: FORTH (58)                 Read Type: GENERAL (+)

 There's a very similar word in HS/Forth called FILE?  You give it the
 address of a string containing the file spec, and it returns a false
 flag if the file does not exist, or a true flag if it does.  The other
 function is very similar to something I was working on a couple of weeks
 ago, DRIVE_READY? which uses INT 25 to test a drive by attempting to
 read sector zero.

 I got inspired to look into that one by a letter in PC Magazine which
 described a very strange program that tested drives that way: it
 included a batch file that created the .COM file by echo'ing ASCII
 characters into a .COM file (using self-modifying code to get around the
 unprintability of much of the required code), running the .COM file, and
 then erasing the .COM file.

 The effort turned our to be interesting, because as the note in Ray
 Duncan's Advanced MS-DOS mentions, INT 25 destroys the contents of the
 registers.  I finally found a version of a word in HS/Forth's utility
 for reading native forth disks that had a version of INTCALL that
 preserved the registers prior to doing absolute sector reads with INT
 25.  First time I'd ever even looked at that extension.
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