Forth

Posted by beardyw 12 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by 7734128 51 minutes ago

My first ever programming experience was a Minecraft computer running Forth

https://technicpack.fandom.com/wiki/Forth_language

I built a massive mining platform that repeated a series of about 200 movements to vacuum up blocks, and used that computer block to orchestrate it.

Must admit that I got a bit scared of programming until I tried again in university.

Comment by jihadjihad 9 hours ago

Slightly OT, but nothing can beat DonHopkins’s “About” section here on HN [0].

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DonHopkins

Comment by dchest 11 hours ago

FORTH LOVE? IF HONK THEN

Comment by kentbrew 6 hours ago

My dad proudly flew one that said FORTH <3 IF HONK THEN. Yes, people did honk.

Comment by mikewarot 9 hours ago

I never noticed the disclaimer at the bottom until today

  xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS
  at a screen resolution of 1024x1. Please enable your ad blockers, disable high-heat drying, and remove your device
  from Airplane Mode and set it to Boat Mode. For security reasons, please leave caps lock on while browsing.
Also, the font chosen is all caps

Comment by Lutzb 1 hour ago

I would not be surprised if an easter egg exists on xkcd.com provided you satisfy these requirements.

Comment by hmokiguess 9 hours ago

Prediction: someone will make a reverse polish notation skill for interacting with claude claiming all sorts of things, like caveman, turn into another markdown as a service company, and make the news.

Comment by DonHopkins 8 hours ago

I present to you, the return-stack skill:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/return-...

See Self's "dynamic deoptimization", where it constructs a virtual return stack on demand that you would have had, were it not for the JIT compiler's agressive inlining.

Debugging Optimized Code with Dynamic Deoptimization, by Urs Hölzle, Craig Chambers, and David Ungar:

https://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/dynamic-deopti...

And a return-stack rotated 180 degrees around in time is an action-queue:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/action-...

From games like The Sims:

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Action_queue

Also the ever popular advertisement skill, more like comefrom than goto:

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/adverti...

Also from The Sims:

https://simstek.fandom.com/wiki/SimAntics

The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs

Comment by hmokiguess 8 hours ago

Amazing

Comment by add2 6 hours ago

Iがforthをloveする

Comment by ithkuil 2 hours ago

Forward Japanese Notation

Comment by joshu 8 hours ago

is it me or is forth coming up a lot lately? or am i just having a plate-o-shrimp situation?

Comment by sph 2 hours ago

The Forth (and Lisp) posts will continue until the entire HN population has been converted.

I am glad that this forum that has mostly been colonized by the ‘normies’ still manages to keep these two languages in the conversation, capturing curious passersby with their exotic allure. In every post you see new prey with the comments like ‘I keep reading about Lisp and I still don’t get why it’s popular. All I see is parentheses. Can anybody explain?’

I fear the day HN closes is the day those languages will die.

Comment by pjmlp 2 hours ago

Nah, we will keep hoping around.

USENET, Slashdot, Reddit, HN, Lambda the ultimate,....

There will surely be a spot left for the refugees.

The biggest issue is when natural language programming would make all these paradigms irrelevant, a curiosity for computing history museums.

Comment by firesteelrain 6 hours ago

It does seem like it the last few days

Comment by lhakedal 11 hours ago

Saw the same joke with Postscript many years ago.

Comment by ajhenrydev 11 hours ago

Can someone explain for me?

Comment by e12e 11 hours ago

A different way to say the same: in forth, words get pushed on the stack, and popped from the stack by words that take arguments:

    code           stack
    I Forth love

    Forth love     I

    love           I
                   Forth

    ; love presumably pops
    ; subject, object args
    ; from stack - and does something 
    ; perhaps prints as side effect

Comment by forsalebypwner 9 hours ago

Is that loss?

Comment by fwip 7 hours ago

No.

Comment by joshu 8 hours ago

well played

Comment by DonHopkins 9 hours ago

Here is some inexplicably but meticulously formatted FORTH code that uses right justified indentation! Including reverse polish notation assembley.

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt

  ( FMOVE -- functional intersegment move                   ) HEX

  88 CONSTANT *MOV*  ( fn = 0 )   20 CONSTANT *AND*  ( fn = 1 )
  08 CONSTANT  *OR*  ( fn = 2 )   30 CONSTANT *XOR*  ( fn = 3 )

  CODE FMOVE ( fn s.seg s.off d.seg d.off length --)  AX, SI MOV
      CX POP  DI POP  ES POP  SI POP  DS POP  DX POP  AX PUSH
                        AL, # *XOR* MOV  DX, # 3 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, #  *OR* MOV  DX, # 2 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, # *AND* MOV  DX, # 1 CMP  1$ JE
                        AL, # *MOV* MOV               1$:
     CS: HERE 5 + , AL MOV  ( modify "[DI], AL MOV" ) 2$:
                      LODS  ES: [DI], AL MOV  DI INC  2$ LOOP
      AX, CS MOV  ES, AX MOV  DS, AX MOV  SI POP  NEXT,  END-CODE

                                                            -->

Comment by spott 11 hours ago

Forth I assume uses reverse polish notation: arguments before the operator.

3 4 +

for example, would return 7.

Comment by zabzonk 11 hours ago

> would return 7

more pedantically, it would push 7 onto the stack

Comment by dbcurtis 9 hours ago

even more pedantically, would remove 3 and 4 from the stack before pushing 7

Comment by DonHopkins 9 hours ago

Even oddly more pedantically, that's the operand stack, not to be confused with the separate return stack. >R and R> move values between the two stacks.

On the other hand, PostScript also has a dictionary stack, which you can use to implement a Smalltalk-like object oriented programming system. And its data types and executable code are basically polymorphic homoiconic JSON (like Lisp), not raw untyped bytes like FORTH.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22456471

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812317

Comment by argimenes 10 hours ago

The stack is really a convenience that makes pipeline-driven programming possible in the language.

Comment by nagaiaida 5 hours ago

somewhat relatedly, shell pipelining is very amenable to being massaged into (non stack-based) concatenative programming

Comment by HFguy 11 hours ago

Forth uses RPN so the "verb" is last.

That is, you provide the data first (I and Forth) and the command (heart) last.

Comment by ithkuil 2 hours ago

AKA FJN (Forward Japanese Notation)

Comment by 11 hours ago

Comment by daureg 10 hours ago

I found https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page quite useful for that.

Comment by perpil 9 hours ago

I first thought this was some spin on May the fourth be with you. As in how Yoda might say it.

Comment by weikju 6 hours ago

My brain tells me Yoda speak would likely be: love Forth, I do.

But then he would also say: Forth is the path to the Light Side…

Comment by sdenton4 7 hours ago

I doubt yoda speak is actually strict enough, but I do enjoy the idea that Yoda comes from a reverse Polish civilization.

Comment by throw-the-towel 7 hours ago

Master Yoda's speech, secret solved is; an old Forth programmer is he simply.

Comment by iberator 5 hours ago

FYI: Forth can be very readable!

IT DOES NOT NEED TO BR ALL IN ONE LINE

Most commercial forth source code is totally readable and maintainable:

comments, newlines, macros, high level commands etc

It's a total myth that its 'write only'. The same nonsense is spreaded by some nerds who actaully never wrote a single program in it.

ps. same goes to COBOL. 99% of fud by guys who never even wrote a simple program in it.

Comment by pjmlp 2 hours ago

Complaining about COBOL in 2026 feels like a joke, especially when doing AI coding and writing book sized instructions to be read by bots.

Comment by dwheeler 10 hours ago

That beautiful is.