Postscript
really is a wonderful thing. :-)
I always assumed that it was a proprietary dialect
of Forth.
It is not. (That is to say, PostScript is not. There may well be
printers that do speak proprietary FORTH dialects.)
PostScript does have the stack-language discipline and postfix syntax
of FORTH, but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. In PS, the
return stack is not programmer-accessible in general, the memory
discipline is mostly that of a free-form garbage-collected language,
the type structure is much more elaborate than "machine word", things
like << and { and ( and % are parser syntax rather than immediate
words, and various other relevant differences that either don't come to
mind at the moment or are small enough that it's impracticel to list
them all individually.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at
rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
