Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!udel!nelson
From: nelson@udel.EDU (Mark Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Re: Success of FORTH in the marketplace
Message-ID: <20855@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 31 Jul 89 20:05:16 GMT
References: <8907300608.AA04417@jade.berkeley.edu>
Sender: usenet@udel.EDU
Reply-To: nelson@udel.EDU (Mark Nelson)
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 32

In article <8907300608.AA04417@jade.berkeley.edu> ZMLEB@SCFVM.BITNET (Lee Brotzman) writes:
>
>   This may be a harsh statement, but I still think that the only way that
>Forth can be truly appreciated is to write a Forth interpreter on you own.
>It isn't as hard as it sounds.  The source code for many interpreters are
>publically available, and all that is needed is to adapt one to your own
>needs.  Don't worry about standards (at least at first) and just plunge in
>and make a Forth that you like.

I agree 100%.  I was in high school when the Byte Forth issue came
out (April, 1979 +-), back before Byte became another PC Rag.  Four
friends and I scraped up $20 (?) to buy a hard copy listing of
the source for 6502 Fig-Forth from FIG.  We typed it in page by
page, writing our own I/O code for the school's Ohio Scientific
micro.  One of the first things I did was write a 6502 assembler
(on four screens!).

When I got to college, in order to learn PDP-10 assembler, I wrote
my own Forth-like language totally from memory (no listings or
documentation) for the school's DEC 20.  This was in my spare
time, first semester Freshman year.  In retrospect, I made some
questionable design decisions, e.g. packing addressed (18-bits)
two to a (36-bit) word, but it worked fine, and it taught me
quite a bit about the instruction set and system calls.

I've since taken parsing and compiler courses, but I still feel
like I know the guts of Forth better than any other language,
with the nearest competitor being interpreted Lisp.

Mark Nelson                 ...!rutgers!udel!nelson or nelson@udel.edu
This function is occasionally useful as an argument to other functions
that require functions as arguments. -- Guy Steele