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R. G. Loeliger Threaded Interpretive Languages Their Design And Implementation[1] is an amazing book, since it was out of print, I printed it on a good 160gsm a4 paper, and I randomly open it every few weeks just to read through it. I strongly recommend it, even if you are not interested in Forth.

I have been programming in all kinds of languages, from assembly to clojure, but in 25 years I never programmed stack languages, I was kind of scared of them, it wasn't until I read the book and made my own Forth I understood what I was missing. Since then I made few interpreters, with jit, or with types, etc, it was super fun, but most of all it allowed me to see a completely new paradigm of programming, kind of the first time you understand eval/apply from 13th page of the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. A language that writes itself and it is written in itself.

If you are making your own Forth, this Brad Rodriguez's article is also really good [2].

[1]: https://archive.org/details/R.G.LoeligerThreadedInterpretive...

[2]: https://www.bradrodriguez.com/papers/moving1.htm



Related to that first link:

Threaded Interpretive Languages (1981) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227466 - June 2018 (1 comment)

and to the second link:

Moving Forth (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26900401 - April 2021 (7 comments)

Moving Forth, Part 1: Design Decisions in the Forth Kernel (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949339 - Jan 2016 (5 comments)


Back in the day, iirc sun workstations booted into forth as a rommed boot-monitor for hw diagnostics. Is forth around anymore in practical use ?


Open Firmware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

OpenBOOT: https://openfirmware.info/OpenBOOT

That second link has a link to a git repository and you can see the forth code there.


The original author of (that first implementation of) Open Firmware, Mitch Bradley[1], is still active on GitHub and in particular in Forth-specific discussions, by the way.

[1] https://github.com/mitchbradley


I recall a RedoxOS developer mentioning they were using a FORTH in the bootloader or some other very low level piece of that project.

FORTH is the type of thing that probably exists all over the place but it's so deep and arcane that you would never know it.


Last I looked FreeBSD was using FORTH in their bootloader


well there is https://collapseos.org/ :)


Bitcoin’s script language for smart contracts / spend conditions is Forth.




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