2023-05-26 22:01 from zelgomer
I've played with FORTH a little. Nothing significant, just enough to

see what it's all about. Ultimately decided that it's not for me,
mostly because I can't get past how cumbersome it is to write reentrant

code. I think there probably is a way to design a FORTH dialect that

Ideally you use the data stack and temporarily the return stack and write reentrant Forth by default, but you don't have to limit yourself to this. You can use locals for example, or if you only care about reentrancy in terms of multitasking then you have USER variables. Some other ways to solve this are through saving and restoring state (or a pointer to such state), which can be done automatically or explicitly.

I think the main difficulty with Forth is that it's so different. I have many years of experience in non-stack languages that I can't fall back on and only a year or two of writing small programs in Forth. Dealing with stacks is also not everyone's cup of tea...

2023-05-27 16:56 from zelgomer
I'll tell you another reason why I need to stay away from FORTH. I'm a

very indecisive person, and FORTH represents a bottomless pit of
freedom. The reason WHY I never did anything significant with it is

because I spent most of my time exploring "hey what if..."s. I've read

that it's a common joke among the community that most FORTHers spend

their time writing FORTHs rather than actually solving problems, and

this was definitely true for me.

Also why I don't need to be in the business of designing my own
languages or writing compilers. I have a notepad somewhere where I keep

track of ideas for "my C dialect," and probably at least half of them

are vague ideas that end with open-ended questions. "It should wash my

car! But should it do it

on Sundays or on Wednesdays? Should it be

configurable? What would the syntax be?"

Yep, Forth is a bottomless pit of freedom and that's why I like it :)


It's funny but and also true that many Forthers spend all their time on their own Forth. I want to write my own Forth some time too but I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to it because Gforth is really good and I have other Forth projects to finish.

If you want a modern C then you may be interested in the Zig programming language.

2023-05-24 20:31 from x4th
I was always paranoid about calculator battery running out during exams

so I brought in a second. I never used an RPN calculator but I'm sure I

would like it. You can program on them too right?

I just used a calculator with a solar cell.

In more recent days they have started allowing you to bring the whole computer in. I have the memory of a teacher telling us we were allowed to bring our computers to the exams and use any program to solve the questions as long as we could show we had writen them ourselves. He did this because he could not believe for the life of him any of us was any good coding two likes of bash together.

I showed up to the next exam with a lame old laptop and a bunch of scripts to solve typical problems. I aced the thing. It was a lot of fun.