4 ms·

Well, my favorite stack based language was RPL on the HP. Simply because it fit well in the scope of the environment that it was used. It was really easy to dev

Well, my favorite stack based language was RPL on the HP. Simply because it fit well in the scope of the environment that it was used. It was really easy to develop and debug on the calculator (I know many did very large projects working with editors on the PC, but I did all my work on the machine itself). It lacked any kind of composite structure outside of lists and arrays. No structs or records. But that was never a real barrier. It was just a nice, high level stack machine with a cool library and toolset.

runlaszlorun 3y ago
As a big RPN and HP calc fan forever, and a recent Forth fan, I was a bit confused by my initial foray into RPL. It seemed like it allow infix notation and that threw me of at first glance. Did I bail to soon? I am a big stack machine convert and have had an HP RPN calc since 12.
- whartung 3y ago
  The HP-48 certainly could do infix style calculations and formulas (the solvers work with these). But from the prompt it’s not particularly natural. Algebraic entry is a second class citizen. But do look at RPL. Anything that lets you push anonymous functions onto the stack can’t be all bad.
shagie 3y ago
My favorite stack based language is dc. It's also the oldest language still found on Unix systems, predating even C (the original version was written in B on a PDP-11 - even before it had an assembler). https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf > Almost everybody in the group has done languages. Thompson and Ritchie built assemblers from scratch. On the tiny PDP-7 the assembler was supplemented by tmg, Doug McIlroy’s version of Bob McClure’s compiler-compiler. Using it Thompson wrote B, the evolutionary link between Martin Richards’s (Cambridge University) BCPL and C. The PDP-11 assembler, a desk calculator dc, and B itself were written in B to bootstrap the system to the PDP-11. Because it could run before the disk had arrived, dc—not the assembler—became the first language to run on our PDP-11. Soon revised to handle arbitrary- precision numbers (v1), dc was taken over by Bob Morris and Lorinda Cherry. It now ranks as the senior language on UNIX systems.
- kragen 3y ago
  huh, i didn't realize until just now that dc had arrays, the : and ; operations i guess that makes it a far more practical platform for applications programming than i had always thought unfortunately afaik it still can't take character input. i guess you could pipe its input through something that converts it into a stream of numbers?

runlaszlorun 3y ago

As a big RPN and HP calc fan forever, and a recent Forth fan, I was a bit confused by my initial foray into RPL. It seemed like it allow infix notation and that threw me of at first glance. Did I bail to soon? I am a big stack machine convert and have had an HP RPN calc since 12.

whartung 3y ago
The HP-48 certainly could do infix style calculations and formulas (the solvers work with these). But from the prompt it’s not particularly natural. Algebraic entry is a second class citizen. But do look at RPL. Anything that lets you push anonymous functions onto the stack can’t be all bad.

shagie 3y ago

My favorite stack based language is dc. It's also the oldest language still found on Unix systems, predating even C (the original version was written in B on a PDP-11 - even before it had an assembler). https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf > Almost everybody in the group has done languages. Thompson and Ritchie built assemblers from scratch. On the tiny PDP-7 the assembler was supplemented by tmg, Doug McIlroy’s version of Bob McClure’s compiler-compiler. Using it Thompson wrote B, the evolutionary link between Martin Richards’s (Cambridge University) BCPL and C. The PDP-11 assembler, a desk calculator dc, and B itself were written in B to bootstrap the system to the PDP-11. Because it could run before the disk had arrived, dc—not the assembler—became the first language to run on our PDP-11. Soon revised to handle arbitrary- precision numbers (v1), dc was taken over by Bob Morris and Lorinda Cherry. It now ranks as the senior language on UNIX systems.

kragen 3y ago
huh, i didn't realize until just now that dc had arrays, the : and ; operations i guess that makes it a far more practical platform for applications programming than i had always thought unfortunately afaik it still can't take character input. i guess you could pipe its input through something that converts it into a stream of numbers?