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Forth and the FreeBSD bootloader

Last year one of our guest columnists, John Sadler, told us how his Forth-based scripting language, Ficl, was incorporated into the FreeBSD bootloader [1]. You will recall that the Ficl interpreter was written in C, that it was intended to be used in small systems where TCL and Python would not fit, and that it had a commendable object-oriented capability. This year we are exploring a closely related topic, PicoBSD (a subset of FreeBSD), in which Forth again plays a crucial role. Much of the following information was adapted from the "PicoBSD FAQ" [2], which I hope you will read in detail.