third

Third, a small Forth compiler for 8086 DOS (by benhoyt)

Third Alternatives

Similar projects and alternatives to third

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better third alternative or higher similarity.

third reviews and mentions

Posts with mentions or reviews of third. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-16.
  • Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jul 2023
    My first programming languages were x86 assembly and Forth. My Dad was into Forth, and I learned programming from him. I wrote several x86 Forth systems for DOS as a teenager, culminating in a somewhat-polished ANS compatible one I called "Third": https://github.com/benhoyt/third -- it's kind of amazing being able to have a fully bootstrapped Forth compiler (including an assembler) in a couple thousand lines of code.

    Just the other day I transcribed an old article I had co-written for the Forth Dimensions magazine. I still like the ideas in Forth, but the stack manipulation quickly gets tedious and is very hard to read. Just look at the code examples in https://benhoyt.com/writings/forth-lookup-tables/ -- especially Search-Table. Yikes! Yes, naming things is hard, but apparently not naming them is even harder.

  • Byte Magazine: The FORTH programming language
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jul 2022
    My dad, who was a minister by day and Forth hacker by night, got me into programming when I was a teenager, and Forth and x86 assembly were my first languages. I wrote a small self-hosting Forth compiler for 8086 DOS (https://github.com/benhoyt/third), a tiny 32-bit Forth operating system for the 386 (I guess you'd call it "bare metal" today). Incidentally, my brother used my Third compiler at his work for a few years to write test scripts for embedded systems.

    I still love the simplicity of Forth, and the fact that you can get a full Forth system going in a few KB on a new microcontroller. I learned the basics of assemblers, bootstrapped compilers (though not parsers, because Forth doesn't need a "real" parser), recursion, how to implement control structures, various kinds of bytecode (called "threaded code" in the Forth world), linked lists, hash tables, and so on. I also dislike 3rd party dependencies to this day (Forth has a pretty extreme not-invented here culture).

    I was really intrigued by Factor when it came out (https://factorcode.org/), as a modern incarnation of Forth, but I never really used it. By that point I had a "real" programming job and was doing absurd things like writing CGI scripts in C, until I discovered Python in the early 2000's. I stuck with Python for many years and really liked it, though more recently I've moved to Go.

    I learned a lot by playing with Forth as a teenager, and I'm really grateful for the language. It was an amazing way to start programming.

Stats

Basic third repo stats
3
71
0.0
over 8 years ago
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