Forth was the language of Sun's Open Boot PROM. From
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-10-1995/swol-10-openboot.html:
When you turn on a Sun workstation, the firmware in the boot PROM
(programmable read-only memory) is executed immediately. The main
function of a boot PROM is to load a standalone program to the core
memory and start its execution. Standalone programs can be operating
systems, diagnostic software, and others. The firmware in Sun's boot
PROM is called OpenBoot. Other than initial program loading and
invocation, OpenBoot provides debugging features to assist kernel
debugging and board bring-up.
In fact, Sun sponsored the IEEE Forth standard. Here's Sun's OpenBoot
Command Reference manual: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/802-3241.
The GNU implementation of forth is available at least in Fedora 7 as
"yum install gforth". Etc etc.
Richard Hitt [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Adam Thornton wrote:
On Sep 25, 2007, at 5:52 AM, Evans, Kevin R wrote:
I remember EEs at a prior company using Forth years ago. They used to
"extend" the language set by "adding" their own instructions. Then
they
couldn't remember "how" their own instruction worked (these were EEs
doing this stuff not software guys...../me waits for the verbal
abuse to
come in), so rewrote it for other code later on. Seemed very powerful
but didn't see much use (at least at that company). I'm not
surprised it
didn't really go anywhere.
Nothing except maybe Lisp rivals Forth in terms of expressive-power-
per-byte-of-language. But then a stack is just a bunch of parens
turned on its side.
It flourished in embedded environments where you had very tight
constraints to work within. The other two places you saw things like
Forth were the HP calculators' RPN (on those models featuring a full
programming language, like the 28S and the 48) and PostScript (which
is a small stack-based language, but not really Forth).
Adam
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