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From: Kragen Javier Sitaker <kragen@canonical.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Postscript in 4tH
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2026 02:09:43 -0300
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albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl writes:
> In article <871pb7l36f.fsf@nightsong.com>,
> Paul Rubin  <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>>That's interesting as Postscript itself is a rather broken version of
>>Forth.  Do you mean with SVG calls you can do all the usual Postscript
>>stuff including text rendering?
>>
>>I just wrote some Postscript code recently and hit some ridiculous snags
>>due to dumb stuff in the language.  They were fixable but "traps for the
>>unwary" as it were.
>
> Maybe you weren't fully embracing the language. Don't expect it
> to be Forth.

I think of PostScript as being Lisp, more or less, but with quasi-Forth
syntax, and using arrays where Lisp uses linked lists.  Maybe Lua or
Python is a closer analogy: PostScript has separate array and dictionary
types, like Python.  But it’s extensible like Lisp or Forth.

Aside from the Adobe manual, Paul Bourke has a great tutorial and
reference at <https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/postscript/>.
Nathan Laredo has an amazing collection of PostScript code at
<https://postscriptcode.com/>, which is worth browsing through, and of
course Don Lancaster has lots of interesting stuff at
<https://www.tinaja.com/pssamp1.shtml> and nearby.

Mitch Bradley wrote a Forth *in* PostScript:
<https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/122630.127247>

Kragen