Adam Thornton wrote:
On Sep 25, 2007, at 5:52 AM, Evans, Kevin R wrote:
I remember EEs at a prior company using Forth years ago. They used to
"extend" the language set by "adding" their own instructions. Then
they
couldn't remember "how" their own instruction worked (these were EEs
doing this stuff not software guys...../me waits for the verbal
abuse to
come in), so rewrote it for other code later on. Seemed very powerful
but didn't see much use (at least at that company). I'm not
surprised it
didn't really go anywhere.
Nothing except maybe Lisp rivals Forth in terms of expressive-power-
per-byte-of-language. But then a stack is just a bunch of parens
turned on its side.
It flourished in embedded environments where you had very tight
constraints to work within. The other two places you saw things like
Forth were the HP calculators' RPN (on those models featuring a full
programming language, like the 28S and the 48) and PostScript (which
is a small stack-based language, but not really Forth).
I've never seen or used Forth, but allegedly the slushware in Apples and
Suns is pretty similar.
http://www.openfirmware.org/
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
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