On Sun, Jan 13, 2008 at 08:19:27PM -0800, Bob La Quey wrote:
Lisp and FORTH have a lot of similarities in this regard. I do think that
lisp does a better job of making itself into a useful programming language,
even for large problems.
Why?
BTW, I meant, "especially for large problems", not "even for large
problems".
A couple of reasons I can think of off of the top of my head:
- Lack of managed memory. There are some implementations that try to do
this, but it is kind of added on, not really integral.
- Grammar. This is what kills it.
In some sense, Lisp and Forth are very similar as far as grammar goes.
Lisp is prefix, and Forth postfix. But, lisp uses parens to group
expressions, and Forth uses an implied stack.
The problem with the implied stack is that it becomes impossible to
understand more then fairly small expressions. With parens around the
expression, I can see how my new expression parses together. If I use the
wrong number of arguments, I get an error, rather than strange stack
corruption.
FORTH has some great ideas as far as extensibility of the language that you
don't see in many other languages. But, the language itself is just so
difficult to use it mostly just gets in the way.
I've done serious work in many languages, including Forth. It's easier
than programming in assembly language, but I would normally chose almost
any other language.
I'm still glad that FORTH was my second programming language (after BASIC).
FORTH can certainly do amazing things with only a few K of RAM. With a
modern computer, there are a lot better choices. Of course, Charles Moore
disagrees with me :-)
Lisp gives me that same silly feeling of power I remember when using FORTH
on a tiny machine.
Dave
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
