Hi folks,

I've written a Hangman game in Forth for my Planck 65C02 system. It's written in Tali Forth 2 and also works in Tali running on py65mon and also in gforth. I think it's a fine example of beginner coding. Any feedback or suggestions for improvement or for writing more idiomatic Forth would be gratefully accepted.

It's on GitHub here: https://github.com/bjchapm/hangman/

Thanks again to all of you for creating these fantastic software and hardware tools.

Best wishes,

Ben

Hi Ben,

This is an excellent little game. I enjoyed playing it. This should run on most forths that support AT-XY and ANSI escape sequences in the terminal for moving the cursor around.

I think Patrick (pdragon) is looking into adding support for KEY? in Tali2, which would let you get better random numbers by asking the user to press a key and use how long it took to seed your random number generator (rather than using HERE). KEY? is in an optional wordset, though, so your current version is probably a bit more portable.

This doesn't really look like beginner Forth. It just looks like regular Forth and is pretty easy to read and follow.

I see your license is compatible with Tali2's Public Domain license. I'd be happy to accept a pull request to add it to Tali2's forth_examples folder (probably in its own subfolder, so you can include your README.md and LICENSE files without having to worry about filename clashes), or I can add it myself with your permission.

Yes KEY? was recently added. It needs a kernel_kbhit routine that flags when a key is available. More in the platform README.
As Sam suggested you can use it in a loop to time the keypress as a random seed, e.g. : foo 0 begin 1+ key? until key ;

You might also be interested in the bundled c65 monitor/debugger which is an alternative to py65mon which is about 100x faster and includes heatmap profiling.

BTW, it's a nice full circle moment since it was reading about Planck that originally led me to explore TaliForth!

Hey Ben!
Awesome that you shared your Hangman game! Forth is really interesting language, though not very popular, so it’s nice to see something written in it. Maybe you could add more comments to the code so other beginners can understand your solutions more easily?
By the way, do you have other projects in Forth?