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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

> My problem is that I cannot see how control flow works in Forth, e.g. a simple if-then-else.

figuring this out for my own FORTH interpreter was a moment i still remember, nearly 50 years later. quite a revelation

In my opinion, a language that requires a programmer to have a "revelation" to understand basic control flow is not a language that is useful or practical for solving real world problems.

I would prefer to write in assembly language than write in Forth. Which is what I have done with one of my current projects.

With assembly language, there is a good chance that a random person with some minimal programming skills would understand my program if I were hit by a bus. With Forth, I think the chances of that are close to zero.

If you're coding, you don't have to understand how to implement control flow. The average C programmer hasn't a clue how the underlying control flow is implemented. It's an _implementor_ of an interpreter or compiler who needs to understand this. Forth is no different from C or any other language in this regard, except that, in Forth, control flow can be implemented directly rather than relying on the compiler or interpreter to understand them.

Immediate words are essentially a kind of macro, if it makes things easier for you.

I remember, many years ago, when I was learning programming. When I grokked recursion, it was a revelation to me. Could I be a programmer without that revelation? Yeah, kind of, but I'd be a lesser one.

i understood how to use IF/ELSE/THEN in FORTH. my "revelation" was figuring out how to do the code generation for it. i was in high school :-)

i definitely prefer assembly to FORTH. i have direct and rather terrible experience with this after watching a few people try to ship a cartridge video game in FORTH

It's a revelation to understand how basic control flow is implemented in any compiler. From your described preference to not learn things that aren't generally known, it's a safe bet that you don't understand CPS or SSA either, or know what a basic block is.

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