4 ms·

> I wanted a language that would be (a) faster to program in (than assembly) but be (b) fast when running. It needed to be pretty efficient. Forth. Problem s

• rbanffy 10y ago
  I did a lot of stuff on Paul Lutus' GraFORTH and TransFORTH. One of my projects on my 5th year in college ended up being a stack-based CPU inspired by Forth. BTW, Mr. Lutus appears around here from time to time.
• jhbadger 10y ago
  The danger of Forth, is that much like with LISP, as soon as a programmer gets competent in it, they think "You know what the world needs? Another version of my favorite programming language".
  • progman 10y ago
    Isn't this a general attitude? I think it applies to many programming languages, in particular at developers who know only their one favorite language. I learned Forth on a 6502 besides Basic and Assembler, and it was the language with the best performance/memory ratio. It was about 10 times slower than Assembler, and very efficient in memory consumption. Memory was a really big issue at that time. And Forth as a programming language is not bad. You just need a lot of discipline (like at Lisp) because it is so extremely powerful. I wonder why Forth isn't used for firmware since buggy code could be exchanged at runtime.
    • jburgess777 10y ago
      Forth has been used for boot firmware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware
    • jhbadger 10y ago
      True, although Forth and Lisp have the advantage of making (at least toy implementations) a project of a few spare evenings due to their simplicity. I was also into Forth in the 1980s on the Apple ][, and have always meant to get back into it (or one of the new Forth-y languages like Factor) one day.