Re: The joy of FORTH (not)

On Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:10:20 -0000 (UTC), Waldek Hebisch wrote:

It seems that you do not know what you are talking about.  Most embedded
systems are small single chip ones.  Smallest chips on the market are
something like 64 bytes of RAM and 1 kB flash.
IMO those make sense if you have simple problem which fits without
making special effort (or maybe you have huge volume).

One product I worked on used the 8749, 128 bytes of RAM and a 2K EPROM.
There were actually two handheld products, pH and ion concentration. The
custom display was different but they both used Ross electrodes for
measurements. There wasn't enough room to do the math for both
applications.

I pretty much knew every byte by name and it was all assembler.

The Forth projects used the Z-80 or TMS9900 and you had all the room in
the world. Forth was great for creating a project specific interface. With
care in creating the words something approaching a natural language
interface was possible.

As you say in the real world there are many engineering decisions to be
made and the suitable programming language is one of them.