A Little Bit of Forth [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6FflPMHZP4

by owainlewis • 11 years ago

39 18 11 years ago

owainlewis• 11 years ago

I found forth a pretty interesting language. Started collecting some useful links if anyone else wants to get started. https://github.com/owainlewis/awesome-forth

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

You should head to http://www.reddit.com/r/forth, you'll be happy.

rpcope1• 11 years ago

I still write some Forth occasionally, it's really awesome for embedded systems, as it runs on little MCUs like AVR. It's so cool to update the program without reflashing the MCU, and have potentially have an interactive interpreter on such low resource processors.

I think becoming proficient with Forth has also made me a better programmer in other languages; for example stack based iterative replacements for recursion come easier, as well as other stack based algorithms. It also makes understand the CPython VM a lot easier.

schsafe5• 11 years ago

Some people compare FORTH with game GO or philosophy ZEN. Very simple rules. And you build an own universe. And all of this fits into a very small size. As you also mentioned.

coroxout• 11 years ago

Nice. Been meaning to dabble more with Forth since stumbling across the Forth Haiku Salon: http://forthsalon.appspot.com/

andybak• 11 years ago

That's incredible. You should make a front page post of it.

TheLoneWolfling• 11 years ago

I have a soft spot for stack-based languages.

Anyone played around with Factor?

MonkeyIsNull• 11 years ago

Yes, it's truly a joy to program in. It's also covered pretty well in Seven more languages in Seven weeks.

doublec• 11 years ago

I used Factor quite a bit in the early days. It's a great language and exploratory programming environment.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

It's kind of a shame that you don't hear more about forth.

mastax• 11 years ago

I've been writing a Forth Interpreter over the past weeks as a way to learn Rust. It's very motivating how quickly a working prototype can be whipped up; once the data structures are worked out it's basically done. There's a quiet beauty and elegance to Forth code that I can't really find anywhere else. At the same time, it's often frustratingly crufty.

lukego• 11 years ago

Learning Forth from the OLPC XO boot prompt is one of the most fun things I have done with a computer. Great tutorial here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Forth_Lessons

schsafe5• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

timonoko• 11 years ago

It would be so sweet if the "(" and ")" were defined as push/pop from a secondary stack. So "(+ 1 2)" would always be equal to "1 2 +".

: ABS (IF (< DUP 0)) (THEN (- 0 SWAP)) ;

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

And for stack lovers :

- http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/media/Eric%20LaForest:%20Next%20G...

- http://fpgacpu.ca/stack/index.html

schsafe5• 11 years ago

I created a FORTH like language some years ago. Also fun.

/home/user/st> more fibonacci

1#[." "#@@+#a-;]10,

/home/user/st> st fibonacci 45

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765 10946 17711 28657 46368 75025 121393 196418 317811 514229 832040 1346269 2178309 3524578 5702887 9227465 14930352 24157817 39088169 63245986 102334155 165580141 267914296 433494437 701408733 1134903170

/home/user/st>

schsafe5• 11 years ago

FORTH is a very old and unique language. Different from all the others. You can find it even in the space-ships.

http://www.forth.org

schsafe5• 11 years ago

If you want to play with an online FORTH interpreter:

http://forthfreak.net/jsforth80x25.html

ok

: fibo 1 dup 45 0 do . dup rot rot + dup loop ;

ok

fibo

1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765 10946 17711 2 8657 46368 75025 121393 196418 317811 514229 832040 1346269 2178309 3524578 5702 887 9227465 14930352 24157817 39088169 63245986 102334155 165580141 267914296 43 3494437 701408733 1134903170 ok..

The Fibonacci numbers :-)

A Little Bit of Forth [video]

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