RayForth: A Forth and Ray Caster Implemented in C++

Jeffrey Drake
25 Mar 2012

Copyright 2012 By Jeffrey Drake
Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Details in LICENSE.

This is a project done for a C++ class at the University of Windsor. 

Excerpt from the paper (RayForth.pdf) describing the details:

Introduction:

RayForth started out as a simple attempt to make a ray tracer. In the process
of building the ray tracer, a method of decoupling the definition of the scene
from the compiled source, or more more simply, a configuration file.

In evaluating the various means to parse a configuration file language, Boost 
Spirit was the top thing on the list, but it did not seem like there would be 
enough time to learn it well enough. The idea of implementing a Forth came
with the thoughts of the utmost simplest way of representing data.

A Forth is a postfix oriented concatenative programming language where its
simplest expression is a series of numbers progressively put on a stack and
function calls to consume them and put a result back on the stack.

For further information, please see RayForth.pdf.

Some points of interest: When I was creating the forth part of this project,
I did not know anything previously about finite automata, except for using
it to implement a counter in electronics. 

So using the concept of a state machine from my electronics courses, I designed
a rather complex state machine with all the transitions (shown on page 8 of PDF).

Now that I am taking a compilers course, I realize that this is in fact a DFA. 
It was very enlightening to learn more about this stuff after the fact. But I 
do not think I would want to make another one of these myself.