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Given that there have been a few sprouts of Forth talk on HN lately, it's worth mentioning that an application-specific OS (written in an application-specific l

by gruseom 16y ago

Given that there have been a few sprouts of Forth talk on HN lately, it's worth mentioning that an application-specific OS (written in an application-specific language) running on bare metal is sort of the quintessential Forth idea. Running it in the cloud, on virtual bare metal, would of course be Forth heresy, but still worth trying.

mahmud 16y ago
FWIW, every innovation in PL research coming out in the last 40 years can be considered anti-Forth, including binary security, strong-typing, platform independent code, modules, streams, exception handling and what have you. I just went through Ertl's dissertation for the third time in as many years, and my impression is that Forth stands somewhere beside formal theories of programming languages, not within. His dissertation provides 3 implementations of forth, just as Dybvig provides 3 for scheme. The two papers are nearly identical in scope; showing different implementation techniques for a tiny kernel language. However, the Forth paper is entirely in C and assembly, without the slightest hint of formal semantics or any other mathematical reasoning. It's a hack upon glorious hack. You can't reason about Forth code without FULL abstract execution, to wit, implementing a full Forth VM with side-effects, or emitting 3-address-code, or some other linear tuple IR, and using traditional techniques from register-based languages with variable assignment. Having said that, I can see why Forth might be fun, as a soul-cleansing language for a programmer who has spent too long in abstraction. Haskellers should use it to bring themselves down a notch [grumble, mumble mumble, something rude, under my breath] [Edit: Oh fuck, I forgot about Factor! I pre-accept defeat, and retract my possibly under-informed arguments if and when Slava shows up to this discussion :-) If his opinion differs, I don't think I am qualified to disagree with the sharpest dude hacking on a language implementation today, and Forth domain expert to boot]

by gruseom 16y ago

mahmud 16y ago

FWIW, every innovation in PL research coming out in the last 40 years can be considered anti-Forth, including binary security, strong-typing, platform independent code, modules, streams, exception handling and what have you. I just went through Ertl's dissertation for the third time in as many years, and my impression is that Forth stands somewhere beside formal theories of programming languages, not within. His dissertation provides 3 implementations of forth, just as Dybvig provides 3 for scheme. The two papers are nearly identical in scope; showing different implementation techniques for a tiny kernel language. However, the Forth paper is entirely in C and assembly, without the slightest hint of formal semantics or any other mathematical reasoning. It's a hack upon glorious hack. You can't reason about Forth code without FULL abstract execution, to wit, implementing a full Forth VM with side-effects, or emitting 3-address-code, or some other linear tuple IR, and using traditional techniques from register-based languages with variable assignment. Having said that, I can see why Forth might be fun, as a soul-cleansing language for a programmer who has spent too long in abstraction. Haskellers should use it to bring themselves down a notch [grumble, mumble mumble, something rude, under my breath] [Edit: Oh fuck, I forgot about Factor! I pre-accept defeat, and retract my possibly under-informed arguments if and when Slava shows up to this discussion :-) If his opinion differs, I don't think I am qualified to disagree with the sharpest dude hacking on a language implementation today, and Forth domain expert to boot]