Hacker News Reader

From the title alone I tought it will be another FORTH interpreter implementation article, but I was happy to see someone actually using it for anything besides proving their interpreter with a Fibonacci calculation.

View on HN

There's another front page article right now with someone using it in a very cool way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46918824

thanks, somehow I missed that.

Yep, given that implementing Forth is so easy (easier even than implementing Lisp) pretty soon nearly every Forth programmer decides to take their turn doing it themselves.

Which reminds me that its time to dust off my old FORTH and make a proper calculator out of it.

I suspect, for many, that implementing a forth is more interesting than using a forth.

Once you start writing really complex programs the system gets painful and hard. But trivial things are easy, and the consistency is so appealing.

It is the bootstrap that makes it interesting.

Creating the required primitives in Assembly, and then the remaining userspace out from them.

Afterwards it is programming like most languages.

I have done it with Lisps though.

Also on 8 bit home computers it provided the feeling to be coding close to Assembly while being close enough to BASIC as high level language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com