A sometimes minimal FORTH compiler and tutorial for Linux / i386 systems by Richard W.M. Jones
"LISP is the ultimate high-level language, and features from LISP are being added every decade to the more common languages. But FORTH is in some ways the ultimate in low level programming. Out of the box it lacks features like dynamic memory management and even strings. In fact, at its primitive level it lacks even basic concepts like IF-statements and loops.
Why then would you want to learn FORTH? There are several very good reasons. First and foremost, FORTH is minimal. You really can write a complete FORTH in, say, 2000 lines of code. I don't just mean a FORTH program, I mean a complete FORTH operating system, environment and language. You could boot such a FORTH on a bare PC and it would come up with a prompt where you could start doing useful work. (...)
Secondly FORTH has a peculiar bootstrapping property. By that I mean that after writing a little bit of assembly to talk to the hardware and implement a few primitives, all the rest of the language and compiler is written in FORTH itself. Remember I said before that FORTH lacked IF-statements and loops? Well of course it doesn't really because such a lanuage would be useless, but my point was rather that IF-statements and loops are written in FORTH itself."
https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth/blob/master/jonesfort...