
Thread beginning with comment 568016
by rapmaster on Fri 26th Jul 2013 17:04 UTC
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In the 80's, Forth was quite popular. I was really amazed how I could write a complete Forth interpreter in 200 bytes of 6502 assembler. Back then, Forth was cool and C was something a few crazy people up in Boston were playing with.

What few people seem to know is that Forth is only one of a family of Threaded Interpreted Languages. What fewer people know is that the Sinclair ZX series of computers used a TIL to create the tokenized BASIC that could run in 1K of memory.

Still fewer know that the internals of many other BASICs of the 70's and 80's were written using a TIL. Just don't call it Forth because that's a trademark.

The chief value of Forth is that it "thinks" the same way that processors do, making everything a stack. If you understand the processor, you can write blazingly fast programs in very little space.

Sadly no one needs tiny languages like Forth. But I still miss it. Hmmm .... I wonder if there is a Forth for the Raspberry Pi?

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