[Melbourne-pm] Dancing around the event horizon

[Peter Lawrence]

On 09/06/2015, Kahlil Hodgson <kahlil.hodgson at dealmax.com.au> wrote:
> On 5 June 2015 at 20:58, Peter Lawrence <pml540114 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> However, every single one of these faces those same political problems
>> of acceptance, and many don't have fully optimised implementations
>> either.
>>
>
> ​I remember a colleague raving about Forth about 8 years ago, but I never
> had a chance to look into it.
.
.
.

Well, if you ever want a taster, Forth has been implemented in Perl (a
quick googling found http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=766784), and
there is/was also a site out there doing it through web pages - all
just for showing it off and/or for fun, not for real, though I
considered using a Perl version for Furphy so as to snarf its garbage
collection. Forth is usually found in niches like embedded systems
these days as its particular strengths don't matter so much on most
modern platforms: small footprint with little sacrifice of
performance, ease of implementation on completely new machines or
others that lack existing tools to create/port new code, etc. - and it
does have a different enough look and feel to be awkward for some
programmers, along with some performance cost in its simpler, less
optimised implementations (even more so in the Perl and web versions I
mentioned, as those are interpreted interpreters), though even those
can have their applications' bottlenecks hand tuned by recoding them
fairly seamlessly in assembler. PML.