Re: +=

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

> >> Remember when Forth was small and elegant?
>
> > ...and it still is.
>
> You and I have very different definitions of what constitutes "small".  I'm
> more with Charles Moore.  I remember being impressed by how powerful a 4K
> (or even smaller) Forth system could be.  I rather doubt that a
> fully-compliant ANSI Forth system could be made that small.

OK, but a 4K system wouldn't do everything that a fully-compliant ANSI
system would. My own hand-rolled subroutine threaded ARM Forth, which is
fully ANSI compliant, though it's missing floating point and a couple of
other word sets, is about 30Kb of code when compiled (including headers).
That's a lot smaller than Lua, even when the latter is dynamically linked to
libc. The smallest Forth I've written, which was based on Charles Moore's
Machine Forth, came in at about 5.5Kb (for the complete binary image), and
implements just enough of Forth to implement itself. It's hard to see how
to make it significantly smaller without it's not being Forth any more
(though targeting it for the Thumb would probably help!).

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | maxim, n.  wisdom for fools