4 ms·
If a Forthlike language was to be made today, what features would it require to not be a hard-to-read mess? I can see some type of typesystem being useful, I do
by ArtixFox 4y ago
If a Forthlike language was to be made today, what features would it require to not be a hard-to-read mess? I can see some type of typesystem being useful, I dont know what else can make it better.
- t-3 4y agoTyping would make things more verbose, but not any more readable than just writing words for each type of data you're dealing with, which accomplishes the same thing. Forth can dictionary mask and forget words, so typed-lang-style overloading is trivial, but unnecessary. Many short word names could be expanded from symbols and abbreviations suited for 4-character names into more verbose versions, but the underlying RPN stackiness would still prove an impediment to broad understanding. Native vectorization like APL or Lisp would increase the base complexity of the language machinery and make implementation more complex, but would allow the language to be simpler by getting rid of the need for most stack reordering.