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The classic introduction to Forth has generously been made available online

There are many variants of Forth. The American standard draft is available at There is much more useful information at this site.

Forth is a stack based language. Functions (known as words) take their inputs from a data stack do their processing and put the results back onto the stack. Words can be spelt with any printable character so for instance the word "+" (without the quotes) adds the top two entries on the data stack together and puts result back on the stack.

There is also a return stack to store return addresses when going into functions. There may be other specialist stacks as well.

Tim

is there place illustrate the most basic words. it is really hard to remember the minimal set and its meaning.

Chapter 5 of http://www.mpeforth.com/arena/ProgramForth.pdf has a good glossary. Searching on Forth glossary on the web tends to bring up ones for specific vendors' products.

I recommend that people who haven't done Forth before read Starting Forth, as the language differs a lot from Algol-like languages, like C.