27 Jun
2002
27 Jun
'02
9:52 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great Tony Duell once stated:
The only language I like more than Forth for _some_ quick hacks is RPL
(Reverse Polish Lisp). It's Forth done to excess in that you can push
_anything_ onto the stack, not just integers (as in integers, reals,
complexes, vectors, matrices, strings, lists (of anything), even
_programs_!). Internally, of course, the stack is a stack of pointers to
objects in memory.
At college I wrote my own Forth-like system (called VIth as Fifth was
already taken 8-) that was pretty much like this. I even used it in one of
my classes to implement a Unix shell where Unix commands could be pushed
onto the stack (let's see, it took about two days to get it extended to be a
fully programmable Unix shell, which was a *team* project for the class).
The more I study both Forth and Lisp, the more I realize that both are
quite similar (only that Lisp is a backwards Forth). I like the concepts of
both but I'm still not satisfied with them (hard to state exactly why
though).
-spc (That as in my Forth phase ... now I'm in a Lisp phase ... 8-)