91–97 of 97 posts
This quote stood out as sounding quite far-fetched: "on many CPUs the interpreter consists of two or three machine instructions". Can someone point to an example?
The book “Threaded interpretive languages” by R. G. Loeliger has details on how Forth & Forth like languages are built re: core interpreter & threading of words.
> One such property is the use of reverse polish notation and the lack or eschewal of local variables. What do you gain by eschewing local variables in favor of reverse polish notation that throws values onto a stack?
Of course, you can implement named parameters and local variables in Forth. There is even a standard for locals in ANS Forth.
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On a new OS, forth often has a "first mover" advantage. E.g. some of the first apps for MacOS were developed in forth. It's also useful when limited resources are available. OO forth is quite pleasant to work in, if you really want to. That said, I wish somebody would have created a statically typed forth.
http://kittenlang.org/
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That's not true at all. I know multiple people who are incredibly productive in Forth environments, though I don't use it myself. Pretending that it's like writing in JVM bytecode (despite some overlap between the two) is completely unfounded. Your claim that C# and Java won based on merits is similarly unfounded: they won because they have major corporate backing. There are countless languages before and after that…
C# and Java won over CIL and bytecode because of corporate backing? You're ridiculous and can't even read. I didn't compare Java to Forth, I compared Java to pure JVM bytecode, both of which are backed by the same corporations. As to people being productive in Forth, that's singular cases and/or fairytales. Let's see some real, large, valuable software written in Forth. Browsers, web frameworks, GUI frameworks, text…
Can you please give some examples on those who are extremely productive using FORTH? I'm intrigued. I think FORTH could be very useful to someone who prefers to work alone or in small group, but I'm not sure how do they use it in daily life.
Forth style is great for writing but very hard for reading. I'm playing around with the idea that you use a Forth-like language to interactively develop code. The steps you perform become AST nodes. Then when you want to read it, it comes out in another form. This is more ideal because it is more interactive and you can see the immediate result every step of the way. This is different than writing traditional code be…
What I would like to have (and looks quite similar to what you are describing) is some APL interpreter (or J or K...) with an RPN input method. The idea comes from HP calculators, where you use RPN to "build" algebraic expressions. I have many ideas for such a system, but it will require much experimentation to get it right and, at this moment, is just vaporware.
The main problem with such a stack based language for 'serious' programming would, I think, be the lack of dynamic allocations. The stack is all nice and fine if pieces of memory only need to be preserved inside functions and their children but if memory is to be allocated for an amount of time that is determined at run time there basically does not seem to be anything to do that. Any kind of solution to this would p…