Re: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? RPN?

From	anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? RPN?
Date	2022-11-16 18:12 +0000
Organization	Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
Message-ID	<22-11-021@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	(1 earlier) <22-10-025@comp.compilers> <29190_1668508275_63736A72_29190_327_1_22-11-007@comp.compilers> <22-11-009@comp.compilers> <22-11-013@comp.compilers> <22-11-015@comp.compilers>

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gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> writes:
>On Tuesday, November 15, 2022 at 1:15:04 PM UTC-8, minf...@arcor.de wrote:
>> Citing its inventor Chuck Moore:
>> "By permitting the program to dynamically modify its control language,
>> we mark a qualitative change in capability. In a sense, our program
>> has evolved into a meta-language which we apply to the application.”
>
>PostScript is also based on an RPN  language interpreter, though I
>am not sure that the above quotes apply in the same way.

IMO it does.

>One that I know about PostScript, and maybe not be true for Forth,
>is the bind operator.

Postscript uses run-time name binding (like Lisp), Forth binds the
names statically. Postscript's bind makes Postscript more Forth-like,
but note that it statically binds only operators (built-ins), names
that are bound to non-operators are still resolved dynamically.

>Before def, which defines a new operator, you can bind, which binds any
>operators inside the new definition to their current value.  (I believe it
>also optimizes them to the address of the routine, saving the time for searching
>for the name in a symbol table.)

Yes, it replaces the names that are bound to operators in the
definition with the operators.  So there is no name lookup for those
at run-time.

>So we wrote a header with new macros, and which then redefined
>def such that later macros wouldn't override them.
>(I think we always called them macros, not operators, but I am not
>sure by now what the right name is.)

procedures

>The Sun boot roms also use Forth, or something Forth-like as the
>built-in control language.

Yes, the base language of Open Firmware is Forth.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-09-30 12:46 +0100
  Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk> - 2022-10-01 15:56 +0100
    Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-10-01 17:05 -0700
      Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-10-02 00:11 -0700
      Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? "Robin Vowels" <robin51@dodo.com.au> - 2022-10-03 12:34 +1100
        Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? robin51@dodo.com.au - 2022-10-03 15:59 +1100
          Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-10-03 12:28 -0700
    Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-10-02 01:21 +0100
  Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> - 2022-10-08 22:44 +0000
    Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? "minf...@arcor.de" <minforth@arcor.de> - 2022-11-14 05:14 -0800
      Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-11-15 06:09 -0800
    RE: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-11-15 11:52 +0000
      Re: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? <minforth@arcor.de> - 2022-11-15 09:48 -0800
        Re: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? RPN? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-11-15 16:11 -0800
          Re: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? RPN? "minf...@arcor.de" <minforth@arcor.de> - 2022-11-16 04:54 -0800
            Re: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? RPN? "minf...@arcor.de" <minforth@arcor.de> - 2022-11-16 05:39 -0800
          Re: Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its implementation? RPN? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-11-16 18:12 +0000

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