Understanding What It's Like to Program in Forth

CRANK

Understanding What It's Like to Program in ForthI write Forth code every day. It is a joy to write a few simple words and solve a problem. As brain exercise it far surpasses cards, crosswords or Sudoku—Chuck Moore, creator of ForthI've used and enjoyed Forth quite a bit over the years, though I rarely find myself programming in it these days. Among other projects, I've written several standalone tools in Forth, used it for exploratory programming, wrote a Forth-like language for handling data assets for a commercial project, and wrote two standalone 6502 cross assemblers using the same principles as Forth assemblers.It's easy to show how beautiful Forth can be. The classic example is:: square dup * ;There's also Leo Brodie's oft-cited washing machine program. But as pretty as these code snippets are, they're the easy, meaningless examples, much like the two-line quicksort in Haskell. They're trotted out to show the the strengths of a language, then reiterated by new converts. The pri…