Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 12th Nov 2002 20:39 UTC, submitted by bland est
Forth has been a recognized programming language since the 1970's. ColorForth is a redesign of this classic language for the 21st century. It also draws upon a 20-year evolution of minimal instruction-set microprocessors. Now implemented on modern PCs, it runs stand-alone without an operating system. Applications are recompiled from source with a simple optimizing compiler.
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The motivation for minimalistic Forth are:
o minimal hardware requirements
o interactive development
o low level language with facilities to perform some really nice abstractions
With a smart terminal, serial I/O, and a block read/write interface to your disk drive, yuo get a higher level interactive environment to hack away at your hardware with.
On 8-bit architectures, you can get the language, editor, and assembler in a system with a footprint of 8K RAM.
It's got a standard behind it, the environment ports easily, and its a fine system for work on smaller systems.
Chuck Moore works in his own little world, designing chips, designing software to design chips, designing software to design software to design chips. He creates a lot interesting designs, and is always willing to defy convention.
Forth is a mindset that takes a bit to get into, and it's really not something that you can dabble in casually. Casual looks at it tend to drive people away, but in depth its a pretty neet system that can be built into something very powerful.