knudsen (11/18/82)
Has anyone out there experienced Forth? I tried to design a similar kanguage off & on for several years, for about the same reasons (compact source code, fast execution by simple interpreter), and am interested by what I've read & seen since. I'd like to hear some praises/gripes from experienced users. There are 2-3 Forth's available for the TRS CoCo, so there must be plenty of them out for other machines, ergo, there must be some 4th-estate types out there. PS-I've used SNOBOL, LISP, C, and several assemblers thruout my life so am not afraid of a little backwards Polish. I want Forth mostly to avoid writing tons of assembler for 6809. latest coconut, mike k
idhopper (11/19/82)
I have recently been doing a fair bit of FORTH work on my IBM PC (although classes have started getting in the way...) and I have accumulated a list of likes and dislikes about the language: I LIKE: the combination of speed and interactiveness (interactivity?). It runs faster than anything else except assembly language or a tightly-written compiler, yet I can still type words and do interactive debugging and testing. I LIKE: the extensibility of the language; it is very convenient to have your own words be completely equivalent to pre-defined system words, along with the ability to re-define system words if you like. I HATE: the static memory allocation. Dynamic memory allocation is simply essential for any REAL interactive programming (graphical programming environments & stuff like that). I realize that dynamic allocation can be tacked on, but it is just that: tacked on. I am working on the design of a version of FORTH that has dynamic memory allocation as an integral part of the language; if anyone's interested I am willing to post what I have done on it so far for discussion. I HATE: the inconsistency and general kludginess of the current standard FORTH word set. It could be cleaned up quite a bit. I DISLIKE: the absolute ILLEGIBILITY of programs. This, however, is the price one has to pay for a reverse Polish language. The main problem is that there is no clear separation between the various arguments to a given word, and no obvious indication of how many arguments a word takes or returns; in fact, both of these can vary, depending upon the values of the arguments passed. OVERALL: I think that FORTH is a good programming environment for a small computer with limited resources, but should be junked once you get enough horsepower to run a really good interactive language like LISP or Smalltalk. --ravi