Re: Naked LUA

[Jim Whitehead II <jnwhiteh@...>]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Everett L Williams II
<rett@classicnet.net> wrote:
> Forth has an amazing history. It was used for a lot of the early space
> probes that had tiny processors with minimal RAM. Some of those have been
> running now for decades, so Forth is pretty sturdy. The problems that I saw
> with Forth when I investigated it were that it is what I call a write-only
> language. As the dictionary builds up, very little is written in base Forth
> primitives, so the code has almost zero actual Forth commands in it, and
> everyone builds their own set of dictionary favorites. I think a better
> description would be that it is a personal or project level language, highly
> unique to it's environment. That is not necessarily a disadvantage, but it
> does mean that receiving code from other sources without a thorough
> documentation of the dictionary entries may be quite frustrating. On the
> other hand, outside of cold assembler or object code, I don't know of any
> system that is much more compact. I remember seeing some studies (from many
> long years ago) that showed that Forth programs were often more compact than
> hand written Assembler. As was noted elsewhere, Forth is also supposedly the
> easiest language to port from processor to processor, as the core primitives
> are infinitesimal. It is my understanding that back in the day, Forth was
> often the first language of any kind on many processors, because it took so
> much less effort than writing an Assembler.

Someone pointed out to me (off-list) that your message was a multipart
message with both text and html versions of the same message. I'm not
quite sure why my client is choosing to display the HTML version of
your message, but I also don't see any option to disable it. Forgive
the noise.

- Jim