4 ms·
When I coded a Forth virtual machine in 8080 assembly in 1985, I soon realized Forth is a write-only language. Fun, but totally unusable for a mediocre program
by java-man 7y ago
When I coded a Forth virtual machine in 8080 assembly in 1985, I soon realized Forth is a write-only language.
Fun, but totally unusable for a mediocre programmer like myself.
- haolez 7y agoIt has less syntax than any other language and it's very good for making a thin DSL layer above your hardware. Please share your experience on this :)
- java-man 7y agoGranted, I was just a kid back then. Read a book about Forth, thought this was an ideal language to write a vm given very limited resources of my home build computer (1K of static RAM). Wrote it in assembly (on a sheet of paper, compiled to hex by hand). Then I tried to write a function that prints a number in decimal format, and realized I could not debug it. Fail!
- anadem 7y ago"My" FORTH was done in 6502 assembler, and used for a water company records and billing system which included interfaces for the company to get the local water flow rates! The meters reported with synthetic voices. Back then BT owned the phone system and were very resistant to letting us pass data from the flow meters to the head office: was it voice or was it data? We argued over that for weeks.
- java-man 7y agoI am almost afraid to ask: is it still in operation? Some of these systems are kept for surprisingly long time (don't fix if it ain't broken)