Re: Perl Forth interpreter

As an old Forth programmer, I'm happy to see this. Although, I probably would have done the core loop much differently.

Forth normally reads the input stream one word (\S+) at a time. This allows immediate words (like '"', '."', ':', and '(') to read the input directly instead of delegating that to the input function. This also allows removal of the state logic in dispatch.

If I remember correctly, the first Forth I learned on had about a dozen words defined in assembly and the rest were defined in Forth. Your experiment reminds me of how little it took to get a beginning Forth system up and running.

Thanks for the memories.<grin/>

G. Wade

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Re^2: Perl Forth interpreter by GrandFather (Saint) on May 30, 2009 at 01:02 UTC
It was very largely for the memories that I did it! And yes, the inner loop is not right at all, but I'd forgotten almost as much about Forth as I once knew. If I were starting over I'd do it differently. :-D Major deficiencies are that it doesn't provide dictionary management, it doesn't manage compile/interpret switching properly, it doesn't facilitate variables, ... True laziness is hard work	[reply]

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Re^2: Perl Forth interpreter
by GrandFather (Saint) on May 30, 2009 at 01:02 UTC

It was very largely for the memories that I did it! And yes, the inner loop is not right at all, but I'd forgotten almost as much about Forth as I once knew. If I were starting over I'd do it differently. :-D

Major deficiencies are that it doesn't provide dictionary management, it doesn't manage compile/interpret switching properly, it doesn't facilitate variables, ...

True laziness is hard work

[reply]