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Forth was neat, but it was a bit of an evolutionary dead end. I'm not aware of any significant concepts from Forth which were adopted by other, later programmin
by duskwuff 1y ago
Forth was neat, but it was a bit of an evolutionary dead end. I'm not aware of any significant concepts from Forth which were adopted by other, later programming languages.
- ks2048 1y agoPostScript
- microtherion 1y agoThe only thing PostScript and Forth have in common is RPN. Other than that, they are very different in philosophy - Forth is very bit banging, close to the metal, while PostScript is much more symbol oriented and high level.
- ks2048 1y agoThat's true, PostScript is much higher-level and feels like a stack-based LISP. But, saying they just have RPN in common makes it seem like a small choice about the syntax - instead of a whole stack-oriented approach, which affects everything.
- microtherion 1y agoWell, yes, the stack oriented approach does matter. But even there, there are big differences with Forth having a user accessible return stack, which is implicit in PostScript, while PostScript has an explicit dictionary stack, which exists only in a very primitive form in Forth.
- tengwar2 1y agoRPL (Reverse Polish Lisp, a high level language for HP calculators) possibly drew on it a bit, though the main antecedents are RPN and Lisp, and possibly Poplog (a Poplog guru was at HP at the time, but I don't know if he contributed).
- xmcqdpt2 1y agoDid Forth inspire the stack-based VMs of python and java? I don't know about that part of CS history well, but a very large proportion of all code runs on stack based byte code interpreters.