As I slowly build my bare-metal operating system and language for the Raspberry Pi, I like to keep looking around for more sources of inspiration. I found a list of stack-based languages somewhere which (among many others) pointed me at Raven, an interesting combination of FORTH, Python and perl. A bit more digging on the …
One of the characteristics of “Problem-Oriented Languages” (POL) is that they are tiny. The language run-time provides just enough to enable a programmer to extend the language into something appropriate to the needs and terminology of the domain. This “tininess” also extends to memory usage. On a single process system the complete language and operating …
Forth, and similar languages inspired by Charles Moore’s approach to software have evolved in a particular direction. Like Donna Noble in “The Doctor’s Daughter”, FORTH is “good with numbers”, but traditionally very limited in its string processing abilities. In Programming A Problem-Oriented-Language (POL), Moore writes: What can you do with a character string? I’ve only …
I have been reading about the early days of FORTH recently, and learned a lot about the ideas and philosophy behind the language and the system. In the past, when I had tried to create my own FORTH-style languages I think I was missing something important. I had been confusing the “language” of available FORTH …