in reply to Re^2: On TMTOWTDIness
in thread On TMTOWTDIness

Indeed I have, and waaaay back in '86 I worked with a visual inspection platform whose recognizer was built in FORTH. Awesome stuff.

FORTH's flexibility is of a different kind, though. Its flexibility coms from its ease of extensibility, not from syntax flexibility. FORTH and LISP have much in common in that respect, but that's a different thread entirely. I would argue that both of those languages are very rigid in their syntax but also very minimal in syntactic requirements. In other words, there's only one way to write them, but lots of ways to extend them. Lots of ways to implement them, too, which is the flexibility you're pointing to.

Don Wilde
"There's more than one level to any answer."

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Re^4: On TMTOWTDIness
by shmem (Chancellor) on May 16, 2007 at 16:14 UTC
    In other words, there's only one way to write them, but lots of ways to extend them. Lots of ways to implement them, too, which is the flexibility you're pointing to.

    Dead on. Perl virtual machine in FORTH, anyone? :-)

    --shmem 

    _($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}
[reply]
      Dead on. Perl virtual machine in FORTH, anyone? :-)

      That's really an obsession of yours, ain't it? ;-)

[reply]
        To be honest, yes. As far as obsession goes (not effort or success), I am in good company (obsession, not FORTH). See Thoughtful Programming and Forth for a nice summary of why I might be obsessed with this idea :-) But it is an idea as of yet, no more...

        Obligatory disclaimer: I agree with many ideas and conclusions laid out there, but not necessarily with all of them. Details of agreement and disagreement are subject to privacy.

        The idea of implementing Perl 6 in FORTH struck me as an obvious thing to try, since FORTH - lowlevel - is much the same way lingua franca as Perl is at the other end of the scale - highlevel (although I'm too much an amateur to try it myself, I guess - we'll see :-)

        update: made clear audreyt is obsessed, but not with Perl 6/FORTH ('til now :-)

        --shmem 

        _($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}
[reply]

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