DMD 1.005 release

Charles D Hixson charleshixsn at earthlink.net
Fri Feb 9 15:29:02 PST 2007


Andreas Kochenburger wrote:
> Kevin Bealer wrote:
>> Charles D Hixson wrote:
>> But the central feature of FORTH is that the compiler and runtime can 
>> be made mind-bogglingly small.  I think the run time speed for a naive 
>> interpretation is probably somewhere between C and interpreted bytecode.
>>
>>  From this page about tiny4th: http://www.seanet.com/~karllunt/tiny4th
>>
>> "The run-time engine takes up less than 1K of code space and the 
>> p-codes are so dense that you can get a lot of robot functionality in 
>> just 2K."
> 
> Before someone thinks, Forth is only a play-thing, see 
> http://www.forth.com/
> 
> There are also excellent freeware versions around, f.ex.
> http://win32forth.sourceforge.net/
> 
> There is even ans ANS / ISO standard for the language.
> 
> Andreas

I wouldn't have minded writing that, but there was a mistake 
in editing.
 >> But the central feature of FORTH is that the compiler and 
 >> runtime can be made mind-bogglingly small.  I think the run
 >> time speed for a naive interpretation is probably somewhere
 >> between C and interpreted bytecode.
etc. was written by Kevin Bealer.

Also, I'm not that impressed by SwiftForth (except the price 
they charge, THAT'S impressive).  OTOH, I'm running Linux, so 
I can only judge them by their web pages.  I tend to think of 
them as being rather like Allegro Lisp:  Enormously more 
expensive than the competition, and only marginally better. 
That said, I don't really have any evidence.  Were I to select 
a Forth to use I'm probably pick gforth or bigforth (+ 
Minos?).  Every once in awhile I think of going back to 
it...but I've lost the books I once had on it.  I've lost, 
sold, given away, or discarded my copies of Forth Dimensions, 
and it would really be a great deal of effort to get as 
familiar with it as I once was.  So I don't.

Neon, though, was impressive.  I think there's a version calls 
MOPS or mops or some such still extant, but I don't know how 
complete it is, and last I checked it only ran on Mac pre-OSX. 
  (I trust that's no longer true...if not, it's history.)



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