Re: [stack] Re: Joy noob checking in!

Duke Normandin <[email protected]> wrote:
> William Tanksley, Jr wrote:
>> I have to say, however, that Rod obviously made a minor typo and
>> accidentally mis-ordered the concatenative languages, which he
>> obviously meant to place at the top of the list. :-) I'm kidding, I'm
>> kidding.

> I must admit that Joy _did_ appeal to me the first time I saw it. How
> well I could do with it may never be known. What do you think of
> Factor?

I like it a lot -- it's a clever language, probably the most complete
application-oriented concatenative language (certainly the most
complete outside of the proprietary Forth vendors). I usually
recommend trying it first; Joy is a fun language, but is rather
academically oriented and not really actively maintained.

>> By the way, if you HAD been interested in bare metal, I'd have
>> suggested learning colorForth and reimplementing it from scratch. Heh.
> Why re-implement from scratch?

Because it's the only way to really understand the bare metal -- and
the only way to get a language ideal for manipulating YOUR machine.

> and why colorForth?

Because it's the simplest dialect of Forth, based on years of Chuck
Moore's experience and centered around the idea of bare metal. (It has
to be said, though, that Chuck's idea of working with bare metal
involved writing Color Forth for the Pentium, writing a chip designer
program on it, designing a whole new chip, rewriting for that chip,
and designing the successor to that chip on the newly fabbed chip
itself. I'm not up to that, and I doubt anyone aside from Chuck is.)

There's a good implementation with examples here:
http://rainbowforth.sourceforge.net/; its own full source code is at
http://rainbowforth.sourceforge.net/blocks.html and might be worth a
quick skim. Chuck's code is public domain as well, but... Well, it's
like expecting to read Knuth in one sitting.

-Wm