Re: The joy of FORTH

In alt.folklore.computers 186282@ud0s4.net <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:

On 10/6/24 11:02 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Sun, 6 Oct 2024 16:06:14 -0600, Louis Krupp wrote:
 

GNU Forth... I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.

 
https://gforth.org/manual/Forth-is-written-in-Forth.html
 
Forth is an odd beast. There is a very small engine that has to be built
for the processor in question to handle words.
 
https://github.com/forthy42/gforth/tree/master/engine
 
gcc can handle that since it is C code.

 
 
  The original Chuck Moore FORTH slightly pre-dates the
  i4004 chip.
 
  As a half-a-step above ASM the syntax is (sort of) more
  readable. The 'stack' approach to dealing with both
  commands and data could be implemented very simply
  (but you HAD to be fully aware of what was on the
  stack exactly where). FORTH also supports subroutines
  and you can make a lib of those.
 
  The interpreter can be VERY small - fit into a little
  old ROM chip. I think one company made CPUs with an
  inbuilt FORTH kernel. It is reported that the first
  language ported to the new 8088/8086 processors way
  back was FORTH.
 
  It was especially popular in the 70s/80s for minimal
  systems - especially for academia/space. If you had a
  telescope on a mountaintop in Chile and a 110 baud
  connection then you could still easily edit/test
  the control program from sunny Cal. I know an old
  astronomer - he is still fluent in FORTH.
 
  Modern chips/systems and 4/5-G or sat connections have
  kinda made FORTH redundant - but it may still have a
  place for some 'industrial' and remote-sense apps
  using power around that of an Arduino or less.
 
  Interpreters can be handy sometimes.
 
  Somewhere I've got a 'CPL' interpreter. CPL
  became BCPL which became 'B' which became 'C'.
 
  gFORTH is kind of a 'cheat' - just a translator
  into 'C'. What you want is a native interpreter.
 
  https://www.forth.org/compilers.html
 
  SOMEWHERE I came across a whole FORTH dev environment
  for Linux but accidentally deleted it.

This reminded me of a time in the early 80s when I had figforth running on
apple ][+.  I needed help and found out there was a forth interest group in my
city.  I went along to a meeting and found they were all uni students (way
above me).  But they weren't using forth.  They preferred a similar language
called stoic that ran on 8080 cpm computers.  It had strings and floating
point!  It was the floating point I missed and the reason I gave up on forth.

I just spent some time googling for it and found archived docs and source on
github. FYI

https://github.com/tendai22/stoic_8080