Re: Back & Forth - Bring your Forth to work

On 01-03-2025 03:03, dxf wrote:

On 1/03/2025 12:54 am, Hans Bezemer wrote:

"Forth is a toy for nerds and academics. It leads to endless philosophical debates, but no one is actually doing something useful with the language."
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That seems to be the general sentiment towards Forth - but I didn't get that memo, I think..
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https://youtu.be/73fDmCh9Mio
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Hans Bezemer

 When the video mentioned 'application template' I felt right at home!
Great to see it discussed on such a public platform.  If there's
anything that still gives this sometimes-jaded forther goose-bumps,
it is this :)  A fine presentation as always!

Thank you very much! Glad you enjoyed it! Well, it was like I told. I was doing a lot of conversion programs, doing the same thing over and over again. So the idea was to make an include file with the basic structure and fill in the blanks.
I didn't go into it, but it also includes resolving the options. It's dead easy - just define a word per option, then link the character to the proper execution token - and off you go!
: get-define get-argument >p ;         ( --)
: get-verbose true to verbose? ;       ( --)
: get-names true to names? ;           ( --)
                                        \ map options to words
create options
   char D , ' get-define ,
   char v , ' get-verbose ,
   char n , ' get-names ,
   NULL ,
I made another template, for evaluating a quiz form. Just provide the questions and answers, the number of options per question - and again, that's it. I guess there are plenty of opportunities to make templates, but in my line of work there were not too many different variants.
To me - it was again a proof of "Forth umdenken". I mean, you could probably replicate that in C and stuff - but I never did.. :(
Hans Bezemer