I was just wondering what the magic was that you saw in FORTH. My
understanding is that it is a very low level language.
Have you ever played with LISP?
Think of FORTH as LISP without parenthesis underneath everything,
except that it never developed enough of a following to develop its own
versions of Scheme or Dylan or ...
Or perhaps it would make more sense to talk about integrating yacc into
C's basic syntax and standard libraries. (Except that doesn't work at
all.)
FORTH needed a lot of work, and the current standard misses a lot of
points, leaves you stuck with a reverse polish C and not-quite-unix
libraries, and still no standard object format.
Java tries to do what FORTH could have done and almost gets there, but
as we all know, that last 20% is where schedules slip and budgets
balloon.
Whether FORTH could have answered the problems that you run into when
you start trying to implement true context sensitive grammars or not is
something I can't prove without fixing the problems nobody ever fixed
in FORTH, but it should work better than languages that can only undo
one dimension of context.
On Jun 7, 2005, at 10:15 AM, Joel Rees wrote:
These days, there's very little true innovation is going on.
I hit that point with MSW3. The first tarnish was in realizing how
few other people saw the magic I saw in FORTH. But it was MSW3 that
opened my eyes to the fact that there really were a lot of people who
really did want Bill Gates or somebody to do their thinking for them.
--
Joel Rees
(A FORTH dreamer imprisoned in a Java world)
