On 2/3/2013 10:51 PM, Levi Pearson wrote: > Aside from Forth, which has fallen pretty far out of common use these days > (as far as I have seen, anyway) there's a cool embedded version of Lua that > can run on pretty low-powered hardware. It's not quite as powerful of a > language as Forth, but probably easier to pick up and very easy to integrate > with C. > My friend RodgerTheGreat (John Earnest) would take issue with this. Two things:
1) Concatenative languages are quite the thing in several fields lately. In fact, Factor is a nice such a language with a pretty extensive standard lib and some great performance. Forth itself is used quite a bit in several embedded environments (there are some nice chips that just run Forth in fact, like the 40-core monster from Forth, Inc). 2) The thing about Forth (and I say this being a hobbyist at best at the thing, but seeing a lot of code in it discussed in my community IRC channel) is that you don't really program any of it the same way you would C. File I/O for instance tends to be nonexistent as a concept, and your debug tools are equally different conceptually. Saying you prefer a "full set of debugging tools" is really just saying you prefer the way you work already, and that's fine, I'm not disputing that. However, it can be read to imply that Forth does not have the level of debug tools or information as your current workflow, which is incorrect. Forth is quite ancient and has developed quite differently, and its debug tools are not very typical any more than the language is. I'm not saying anyone should use Forth, mind you. I'm just saying there is a lot of use out there in several fields, not just Academic in nature, and there are a great deal of methodologies and tools available for such. There's even a Minecraft mod called RedPower2 that is an M68k computer that runs Forth. And it's fairly popular and everything. My mind. She is blown. -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
