A Forth haiku is an attempt to mix math, art and Forth

http://forthsalon.appspot.com/

by pointfree • 12 years ago

47 10 12 years ago

forthsalon.appspot.com

This is awesome and really shows off the beautiful compactness of Forth.

It took me a moment to figure out what to actually do. Basically you just write a little program that produces three floating-point values from 0.0 to 1.0, and these are used as the R, G, and B channels of each pixel in the output. For example, an all-red image is:

    1 0 0

And a blue-cyan-magenta rectangle is:

    x y 1

You get the x and y of the current pixel with the “x” and “y” words, and you get the current time with the “t” word in order to make animations. Here’s one that continually oscillates between black and white:

    : r 5 ;
    : sin' sin 1 + 2 / ;
    : t' t r * sin' ;
    t' t' t'

(You can change the value of “r” to make it oscillate faster or slower.)

Looking at the glossary[1] and cannibalising other examples is really helpful.

[1] http://forthsalon.appspot.com/word-list

to3m2• 12 years ago

You can put a 4th value on the stack, and it's interpreted as the alpha value.

evincarofautumn2• 12 years ago

Cool. Unfortunately I saw all these things on the “about” page after I had figured out how to use it through trial and error. That’s what I get for not paying attention!

pointfree• 12 years ago

Looks like the author put together some decks of slides on his website:

http://bradn123.github.io/

pkaye• 12 years ago

I seem to remember something similar but used a C like language.

kaoD2• 12 years ago

Probably one of the many WebGL shader toys (such as https://www.shadertoy.com/) which use GLSL.

to3m2• 12 years ago

http://shadertoy.com/ uses GLSL (or whatever its WebGL equivalent is). Is that what you're thinking of?

(The language is syntactically similar to C, but quite different from it in some respects, as it compiles to code that runs directly on the GPU. GPUs have a very different execution model from a CPU - though they have been moving closer together and I guess that trend will continue. On the plus side, the performance can be excellent, provided your PC has a decent GPU.)

ANTSANTS• 12 years ago

See also IBNIZ, a livecoding environment with a language inspired by (and even more terse than) FORTH.

http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/12/ibniz-hardcore-au...

kaoD2• 12 years ago

I wondered if the Forth code was being transpiled into JS or GLSL. Inspecting the source reveals it is JS, which seems sensible since it has stacks.

That made me wonder, how hard would it be to turn Forth code into imperative GLSL? Seems like a fun exercise and would allow huge canvases.

amenghra• 12 years ago

http://forthsalon.appspot.com/haiku-view/ahBzfmZvcnRoc2Fsb24...

A Forth haiku is an attempt to mix math, art and Forth

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