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There is a commercial forth called 8th that has a few thousand users and has support for ODBC, a few native databases, Bluetooth, can run on iOS, Android, Mac,

There is a commercial forth called 8th that has a few thousand users and has support for ODBC, a few native databases, Bluetooth, can run on iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, Windows, has a GUI, can cross-compile to different systems, matrices, constraint solver, I/O for a lot of common formats...etc. It's a cool language that has the same abstraction as Python, but can go lower as well.

throwaway81523 5y ago
> There is a commercial forth called 8th 8th resembles Forth about as much as Javascript resembles C. There is a superficial similarity but 8th underneath is dynamically typed, garbage collected, etc, while Forth is close to assembler. That said, 8th is cool.
- 7thaccount 5y ago
  I think it's more than superficial. Word definitions are done the same and you concatevatively build up your DSL in the same manner. Nothing keeps any other Forth from having a GC, it's just that many are thin layers over the hardware and are used in applications where a GC is unnecessary. In general, I kinda get what you're saying though in that JS and C share a syntax and are very different. However, 8th still is stack based and has all the hallmark Forth words like "dup", "rot", "pick"... etc that clearly mark it as part of that language family.
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    Sure, and JS has "for", "while", etc. The issue is the mindset during use, which is completely different between Forth and 8th. You could also look at Oforth, which is like 8th despite having Forth in its name, and which is free (oforth.com).
    - isr 5y ago
      Is oforth still being developed?
  - caslon 5y ago
    PostScript also has dup, rot and pick, though the last two are given different names, and it's stack-based. PostScript is a derivative of FORTH, but it isn't FORTH. While a FORTH can be object-oriented (more than a few have been), have any which way of memory management and so forth, it might be more generous to describe 8th as its own descendant thing to stop Moore from rolling in his... bed. He's still alive; we aren't saying grave yet. 8th does sort of get rid of the ethos of FORTH, which is a pretty important part of a language.
    - 7thaccount 5y ago
      I would totally agree it runs somewhat counter to Moore's ideas of insanely low fat computing, but Moore isn't the sole viewpoint on Forth (big as he is and with being the creator and a freaking genius). How big are other Forth's like GForth? It's still a Forth right? I just think you're being over specific, but to each their own.
      - throwaway81523 5y ago
        Gforth is a fairly large Forth but it is still a Forth in the sense that cells can hold untyped machine addresses, etc. You can write realtime applications in Forth (deterministic execution paths, no gc delays etc), it has its own weird metaprogramming model, etc. I don't think 8th is anything like that. I haven't used 8th though.

throwaway81523 5y ago

> There is a commercial forth called 8th 8th resembles Forth about as much as Javascript resembles C. There is a superficial similarity but 8th underneath is dynamically typed, garbage collected, etc, while Forth is close to assembler. That said, 8th is cool.

7thaccount 5y ago
I think it's more than superficial. Word definitions are done the same and you concatevatively build up your DSL in the same manner. Nothing keeps any other Forth from having a GC, it's just that many are thin layers over the hardware and are used in applications where a GC is unnecessary. In general, I kinda get what you're saying though in that JS and C share a syntax and are very different. However, 8th still is stack based and has all the hallmark Forth words like "dup", "rot", "pick"... etc that clearly mark it as part of that language family.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Sure, and JS has "for", "while", etc. The issue is the mindset during use, which is completely different between Forth and 8th. You could also look at Oforth, which is like 8th despite having Forth in its name, and which is free (oforth.com).
  - isr 5y ago
    Is oforth still being developed?
- caslon 5y ago
  PostScript also has dup, rot and pick, though the last two are given different names, and it's stack-based. PostScript is a derivative of FORTH, but it isn't FORTH. While a FORTH can be object-oriented (more than a few have been), have any which way of memory management and so forth, it might be more generous to describe 8th as its own descendant thing to stop Moore from rolling in his... bed. He's still alive; we aren't saying grave yet. 8th does sort of get rid of the ethos of FORTH, which is a pretty important part of a language.
  - 7thaccount 5y ago
    I would totally agree it runs somewhat counter to Moore's ideas of insanely low fat computing, but Moore isn't the sole viewpoint on Forth (big as he is and with being the creator and a freaking genius). How big are other Forth's like GForth? It's still a Forth right? I just think you're being over specific, but to each their own.
    - throwaway81523 5y ago
      Gforth is a fairly large Forth but it is still a Forth in the sense that cells can hold untyped machine addresses, etc. You can write realtime applications in Forth (deterministic execution paths, no gc delays etc), it has its own weird metaprogramming model, etc. I don't think 8th is anything like that. I haven't used 8th though.