3 ms·

The comparison to Lisp always seems to pop up for some reason, but at the end of the day Forth draws very little, if any, inspiration from Lisp, and has very di

The comparison to Lisp always seems to pop up for some reason, but at the end of the day Forth draws very little, if any, inspiration from Lisp, and has very different functionality and evolutionary history. They are both "small" languages in some sense, but it is rare to see anyone claim that Brainfuck is a Lisp, or that they are somehow twins separated at birth if you turn your head to the right angle and squint. It is better to simply learn about Forth instead of attempting to hammer it into the mold of another language one has heard of before.

mikewarot 6y ago
> It is better to simply learn about Forth instead of attempting to hammer it into the mold of another language one has heard of before. I knew Forth, I'm learning Racket (Lisp)... and I'd previously watched Uncle Bob Martin's talks about the quest for the ultimate programming language (Which at the time, he thought was Clojure)... it was then that I realized there is a continuum from Prefix (Lisp, etc) through infix (C, Pascal, Fortran, etc) to Postfix (Forth, Postscript, Cannon Cat, etc) Stoical is a Forth that handles lists, dictionaries, etc... it was implemented on the DEC PDP-11, and formed the basis of the RED editor. It was then ported to Linux by the author who later wrote DAW. I tried to revive it, but I don't really know C that well, and it made a LOT of assumptions about word size that I don't know how to get around in a 64 bit environment. I strongly suspect you could write Lisp in Stoical and vise-versa.