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People think figForth is an obsolete, dead and useless dialect of Forth - Says David Husband

They could not be further from the truth… Here I say this: ”Baremetal Engineer Extraordinaire, David Husband, believes he has discovered a number of astounding functional equivalences between a number of figForth words, structures and internal processes, etc, and between some other, seemingly unrelated and unconnected processes in another major knowledge domain…“

“As part of his Ph.d opportunity project, he is currently working very hard at researching, verifying, validating and documenting his beliefs in the form of a scientific publication for release at some future date…“

Ok, so what is Forth ?

Forth is a computer language and problem-solving philosophy
This site is all about the legacy/classic Forth dialect known as figForth ¹

”Forth is a procedural, stack-oriented programming language and interactive environment designed by Charles H Moore and first used by other programmers in 1970 … Forth combines a compiler with an integrated command shell, where the user interacts via subroutines called words. Words can be defined, tested, redefined, and debugged without recompiling or restarting the whole program. All syntactic elements, including variables and basic operators, are defined as words. A stack is used to pass parameters between words, leading to a Reverse Polish Notation style”    Source: Wikipedia

In essence, Forth is an extensible Interpretive Compiler where the act of programming to solve a problem is to extend the word-set of the language… Simple !!

Forth as a Language Concept & Modus Operandi

“Forth was developed by Charles Moore in the 1960’s. It took the final form as we now know it in 1969, when Mr. Moore was at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, Va, USA. It was created out of his dissatisfaction with available programming tools, especially for instrumentation control and automation. Distribution of his work to other observatories has made Forth the standard language for observatory automation. Mr. Moore and several associates formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973 for the purpose of licensing and support of the Forth operating system and programming language, and to supply application software to meet customers’ unique requirements”    Source: (Ting 2013, p. viii) ²

Forth is a genre of a Threaded Interpretive Language (“TIL”) (Loeliger 1981, p. 2)

Or to put it another way, Forth is an “interpretive compiler“ based upon threaded code…

Next Section: The Forth Paradigm

References:

Loeliger, R. G., 1981. Threaded Interpretive Languages - Their Design and Implementation [online]. Available from: Http://figforth.org.uk/library/R. G. Loeliger__Threaded.Interpretive.Languages.pdf.

Ting, C. H., 2013. Systems Guide to fig-Forth [online]. 3rd ed. San Mateo, CA 94402, USA: Offete Enterprises, Inc. Available from: http://figforth.org.uk/library/Systems.Guide.to.figForth.pdf.