Technical Q&A HW73

Using "words" in Open Firmware

Q: I have used the Open Firmware word words to see what words are implemented on the Macintosh. However, the list is too large to see anything quickly. What do you suggest?

A: First, words displays to standard out all the global and local words available for execution.

Try the word sifting, which was introduced on NewWorld machines. sifting takes, as its argument, the alphanumeric character/s that follow/s in the input stream as a literal string. This string is used as search criterion to the Open Firmware dictionary. It saves a lot of output to standard out. Try this at your console. First, enter words when you first enter the Open Firmware user interface. You'll see quite a large list. Say you're interested in a word that contains "$" in its name. Enter sifting $ and you will notice a large difference. Thank your Apple Open Firmware Engineering community for the word sifting.