Forth: A New Way to Program a Mini Computer (1974)

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • collapseos

    Discontinued Bootstrap post-collapse technology

  • You may be interested in Collapse OS, a "Forth operating system and a collection of tools and documentation with a single purpose: preserve the ability to program microcontrollers through civilizational collapse".

    http://collapseos.org

  • factor

    Factor programming language

  • I was introduced to Froth via [Factor](https://factorcode.org) (which I discovered as a jEdit user as both have the same initial author). Factor is a garbage collected higher order Forth that makes it more fun to program in (example: 'quotations', basically pushing lambdas on the stack). If I am doing coding puzzles I do it in Factor. Some might argue that it's not a real Forth because it's not as close to the metal... but you could rewrite Factor in Forth and then the distinction would be gone (think Lisp reader macros). I recommend people curious give it a try.

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  • Thun

    This is a mirror for https://ariadne.systems/gogs/sforman/Thun

  • I've been playing with a language called Joy, created by Manfred von Thun, which seems to me to combine the best parts of Forth and Lisp while being simpler and more elegant than both. I suspect it might be the simplest useful language.

    "A Conversation with Manfred von Thun" in Vector, journal of the British APL Association http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10000350

    https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html

    Kevin Albrecht’s mirror of Manfred von Thun’s original website for the Joy Programming Language http://www.kevinalbrecht.com/code/joy-mirror/index.html

    https://joypy.osdn.io/ (My own project) Here's a flowchart (SVG) for the interpreter loop: https://github.com/calroc/Thun/blob/simpler/joy_interpreter_...

    It boils down to quotation as the primary operation, denoted by enclosing expressions in square brackets. Various combinators accept quotes on the stack and prepend (or not) one or more of them to the pending expression under evaluation (like Continuation-Passing Style), and that's it. That's the whole evaluation model.

    E.g. "branch" combinator accepts a Boolean value and two quoted expressions and put one of them onto the pending expression based on the Boolean value:

        bool [ELSE] [THEN] branch

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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