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Forth

xkcd.com

232 pointsbeardyw54 comments

Slightly OT, but nothing can beat DonHopkins’s “About” section here on HN [0].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DonHopkins

FORTH LOVE? IF HONK THEN

I never noticed the disclaimer at the bottom until today

  xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS
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Also, the font chosen is all caps

I would not be surprised if an easter egg exists on xkcd.com provided you satisfy these requirements.

Aha, especially the boat mode.

Maybe something like

> Mozilla/4.0 [en] (AppleIIGS; U; P3±1-emu; 1024x1; BoatMode; CapsLk)

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Footnote

My first ever programming experience was a Minecraft computer running Forth

https://technicpack.fandom.com/wiki/Forth_language

I built a massive mining platform that repeated a series of about 200 movements to vacuum up blocks, and used that computer block to orchestrate it.

Must admit that I got a bit scared of programming until I tried again in university.

My first PID controller was in Industrial Craft & Tekkit modded Minecraft.

My dad proudly flew one that said FORTH <3 IF HONK THEN. Yes, people did honk.

Prediction: someone will make a reverse polish notation skill for interacting with claude claiming all sorts of things, like caveman, turn into another markdown as a service company, and make the news.

I present to you, the return-stack skill:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/return-...

See Self's "dynamic deoptimization", where it constructs a virtual return stack on demand that you would have had, were it not for the JIT compiler's agressive inlining.

Debugging Optimized Code with Dynamic Deoptimization, by Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers, and David Ungar:

https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/dynamic-deopti...

And a return-stack rotated 180 degrees around in time is an action-queue:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/action-...

From games like The Sims:

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Action_queue

Also the ever popular advertisement skill, more like comefrom than goto:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adverti...

Also from The Sims:

https://simstek.fandom.com/wiki/SimAntics

The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

Amazing

Iがforthをloveする

Forward Japanese Notation

Hey whatever happened to Factor? That was an amazingly professional offering in a weird and dusty corner of the programming languages.

it's somewhat alive.

they do some releases, they have a somewhat big project of rewriting vm in zig.

Saw the same joke with Postscript many years ago.

I don't think anyone loves PostScript though...

Don Lancaster did. He used to write programs in Postscript to make figures - he preferred that to using drawing programs.

I think he did that only to impress his hacker friends. ;-)

And because laser printers were often the fastest computer in the office.

The PS version went something like

{honk} ps love if.

You never heard a lot of honks, come to think of it.

is it me or is forth coming up a lot lately? or am i just having a plate-o-shrimp situation?

It does seem like it the last few days

It's a beautiful little language.

We should do more with FORTH.

The Forth (and Lisp) posts will continue until the entire HN population has been converted.

I am glad that this forum that has mostly been colonized by the ‘normies’ still manages to keep these two languages in the conversation, capturing curious passersby with their exotic allure. In every post you see new prey with the comments like ‘I keep reading about Lisp and I still don’t get why it’s popular. All I see is parentheses. Can anybody explain?’

I fear the day HN closes is the day those languages will die.

Nah, we will keep hoping around.

USENET, Slashdot, Reddit, HN, Lambda the ultimate,....

There will surely be a spot left for the refugees.

The biggest issue is when natural language programming would make all these paradigms irrelevant, a curiosity for computing history museums.

It's archaic, powerful, expressive, compact. I'd describe it as an interactive macro-assembler on steroids. What's not to like?

But it's different. Certainly not for everyone (imho that makes it even more interesting). So yeah, shouldn't hurt the HN audience to pop by now & then.

I'm not complaining - I even have a Forth pet project myself. Just noticing that it's showing up a lot lately.

I think there are phases where it becomes more popular, if some discussion topically references FORTH, or Lisp, you know that within a few hours other people will read them and make submissions on the same theme.

It's nice.

As for me I'll almost blindly vote up anything that references FORTH because I love implementing it. I don't use it. Few people do these days, but writing toy implementations is satisfying, for sure.

(I do use Lisp, and within the past month posted my own lisp compiler here. A few votes and a brief bit of commentary which is about all it deserved. But I like seeing other people's approaches and I suspect that's why it got the minimal attention it did.)

FYI: Forth can be very readable!

IT DOES NOT NEED TO BR ALL IN ONE LINE

Most commercial forth source code is totally readable and maintainable:

comments, newlines, macros, high level commands etc

It's a total myth that its 'write only'. The same nonsense is spreaded by some nerds who actaully never wrote a single program in it.

ps. same goes to COBOL. 99% of fud by guys who never even wrote a simple program in it.

Complaining about COBOL in 2026 feels like a joke, especially when doing AI coding and writing book sized instructions to be read by bots.

You can't have _any_ BR all in one line.

Can someone explain for me?

Forth I assume uses reverse polish notation: arguments before the operator.

3 4 +

for example, would return 7.

> would return 7

more pedantically, it would push 7 onto the stack

even more pedantically, would remove 3 and 4 from the stack before pushing 7

Even oddly more pedantically, that's the operand stack, not to be confused with the separate return stack. >R and R> move values between the two stacks.

On the other hand, PostScript also has a dictionary stack, which you can use to implement a Smalltalk-like object oriented programming system. And its data types and executable code are basically polymorphic homoiconic JSON (like Lisp), not raw untyped bytes like FORTH.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456471

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812317

The stack is really a convenience that makes pipeline-driven programming possible in the language.

somewhat relatedly, shell pipelining is very amenable to being massaged into (non stack-based) concatenative programming

Forth uses RPN so the "verb" is last.

That is, you provide the data first (I and Forth) and the command (heart) last.

AKA FJN (Forward Japanese Notation)

A different way to say the same: in forth, words get pushed on the stack, and popped from the stack by words that take arguments:

    code           stack
    I Forth love

    Forth love     I

    love           I
                   Forth

    ; love presumably pops
    ; subject, object args
    ; from stack - and does something 
    ; perhaps prints as side effect

Is that loss?

well played

No.

Here is some inexplicably but meticulously formatted FORTH code that uses right justified indentation! Including reverse polish notation assembley.

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt

  ( FMOVE -- functional intersegment move                   ) HEX

  88 CONSTANT *MOV*  ( fn = 0 )   20 CONSTANT *AND*  ( fn = 1 )
  08 CONSTANT  *OR*  ( fn = 2 )   30 CONSTANT *XOR*  ( fn = 3 )

  CODE FMOVE ( fn s.seg s.off d.seg d.off length --)  AX, SI MOV
      CX POP  DI POP  ES POP  SI POP  DS POP  DX POP  AX PUSH
                        AL, # *XOR* MOV  DX, # 3 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, #  *OR* MOV  DX, # 2 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, # *AND* MOV  DX, # 1 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, # *MOV* MOV               1$:
     CS: HERE 5 + , AL MOV  ( modify "[DI], AL MOV" ) 2$:
                      LODS  ES: [DI], AL MOV  DI INC  2$ LOOP
      AX, CS MOV  ES, AX MOV  DS, AX MOV  SI POP  NEXT,  END-CODE

                                                            -->

Actually the stack is wrong here, after pushing two words, the sequence should be:

    Forth
    I

I found https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page quite useful for that.

I first thought this was some spin on May the fourth be with you. As in how Yoda might say it.

I doubt yoda speak is actually strict enough, but I do enjoy the idea that Yoda comes from a reverse Polish civilization.

Master Yoda's speech, secret solved is; an old Forth programmer is he simply.

My brain tells me Yoda speak would likely be: love Forth, I do.

But then he would also say: Forth is the path to the Light Side…

That beautiful is.

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