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I have been looking at Forth programming and one thing I would like to figure out is how to use gforth under Linux in a pipeline of shell and awk. I haven't yet found a practical use for Forth in this environment yet...

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Maybe Retro forth is worth looking into in this regard (I haven't really used it myself, but the conception and minimalism around it are really appealing):

http://forthworks.com/retro

http://forthworks.com/retro/book.html#using-in-a-pipe

Forth isn't super practical in such an environment; gForth in particular is a bit "large". (Not that this is bad, but it's of the second school the article mentions.) If you wanted, you could cobble together a Forth implementation that played nicely with pipes. I did this, it works fine, but it's not the type of environment that matches Forth very well.

Forth's design is to give you the machine and let you compute with it rather than to act as part of a pipeline.

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