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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> Forth is the only one in which this is possible. Every other example I've seen always uses C for "low-level" access or a libraries. If you need to do that, then you won't win over embedded devs like me.

Not really.

https://www.mikroe.com/mikrobasic/

https://www.mikroe.com/mikropascal/

http://www.astrobe.com/default.htm

http://www.adacore.com/gnatpro/embedded

http://www.ptc.com/developer-tools/apexada

http://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html

Zero lines of C.

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AmiBlitz (the Amiga Blitz Basic version) is another - you can write M68k assembler anywhere in a program, as they're legal AmiBlitz syntax.

http://www.amiblitz.de/

Is there any reason he would have heard of those? They're all pretty fringe, arguably moreso than Forth, for some of them.

Some of these do look neat: I've had an interest in both Ada and Oberon, although I haven't been able to get over the verbosity and unpleasant syntax of either (it's not COBOL, or anything, but it's not nice).

OTOH, I am immediately suspicious of any product that claims it's professional and also has BASIC in the name...

Ada is not fringe. It's used by many large companies, although less and less these for new projects these days. There are some huge Ada codebases being maintained in industry, particularly in the aviation industry.

Actually, I might get the wrong picture but from FOSDEM talks and high integrity conferences programms, I get the opposite view.

The same can be said of Lisp and Forth. Would you call them fringe?

> OTOH, I am immediately suspicious of any product that claims it's professional and also has BASIC in the name...

For many years the Elektor magazine and a few other competing ones, had the listings of electronic stuff done in Assembly, Basic and Turbo Pascal.

Before Raspberry PI was a thing, many developers were using Basic STAMP.

https://www.parallax.com/catalog/microcontrollers/basic-stam...

I'm aware, but... urgh. Yuck. I don't think BASIC causes brain damage, but I also don't think it's a very nice thing to work in.

Although I suppose it does depend on the dialect, to an extent...

You are right. I completely forgot about ADA and representative clauses. I remember reading that representative clauses mapping to register fields. And to be fair, basic and pascal also can be used for bare metal stuff.

Ada isn't a dynamic language, so it doesn't really apply here; you don't get to use it in the ways like Forth; like having a boot ROM with an Ada REPL (laugh).

Of course there are other systems programming "monolithic executable" programming languages that allow straightforward access to memory mapped hardware registers.

Static languages can have REPLs.

They can, but I'm not even sure you'd be able to fit all of Ada's reserved words in a typical boot ROM ;)

Some years ago when Java was relatively new, I had come across this company Esmertec, which was making Java toolchains for embedded devices. Site seems to be still there, not sure about the company:

www.esmertec.com

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