Read it once more, and it was a good way to remind me of how fun programming was before we had megabyte libraries and dozens of layers of abstraction.
I also noticed something that made me smile:
"There is no generally agreed syntax for this, so I've gone for the syntax mandated by the ISO standard"
You won't read that in the source code of a C, pascal, or Fortran compiler, and there basically is only one forth standard, but historically, many implementations know better than to follow it. That is both a good and a bad thing.
On the plus side, it is extremely flexible, but the price one pays for that is that there is barely any code reuse because every system is different.
For systems on which Forth shines, that isn't a problem. There, you do not include that 400 byte floating point library "as is", but take the source, remove the 2% of it that you do not need, and tweak a few calls to make them smaller at the price of performance because you don't have 400 bytes to waste on a bloated floating point package. You don't program in Forth, you write a forth.
Comments
Read it once more, and it was a good way to remind me of how fun programming was before we had megabyte libraries and dozens of layers of abstraction.
I also noticed something that made me smile:
"There is no generally agreed syntax for this, so I've gone for the syntax mandated by the ISO standard"
You won't read that in the source code of a C, pascal, or Fortran compiler, and there basically is only one forth standard, but historically, many implementations know better than to follow it. That is both a good and a bad thing.
On the plus side, it is extremely flexible, but the price one pays for that is that there is barely any code reuse because every system is different.
For systems on which Forth shines, that isn't a problem. There, you do not include that 400 byte floating point library "as is", but take the source, remove the 2% of it that you do not need, and tweak a few calls to make them smaller at the price of performance because you don't have 400 bytes to waste on a bloated floating point package. You don't program in Forth, you write a forth.