5/26/09

Forth Philosophy 1998

Forth is a weird language, it is a procedural, stack-oriented and reflective programming language without type checking, it was designed as an operating system. Being untyped, it lost to C, thought it has some advantages such as a trivial calling convention, unfortunately often bound to the hardware, and usually it comes with an interactive shell.



A paper on how Forth did over the years: Forth Philosophy 1998 which compares it, among others, to Linux. Forth is still actively used for low-level applications such as in embedded devices and boot loaders. It is part of the GNU compiler collection.