Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: native compiling embedable Forth with decent IDE Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2016 12:43:52 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 32 Message-ID: <87d1k5c5jb.fsf@jester.gateway.pace.com> References: <57d6b288.16769967@news.eternal-september.org> <2016Sep13.184543@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> <2016Sep14.171624@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="590ea01354cf4bcbcd857d7ebbd88128"; logging-data="16441"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/AXhao6/+RJP8nbImC+lMP" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:9VyGdcnZZgJV72letIOfDCC39o0= sha1:903DTKXRjdK44SjEh3yj80aOUvw= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:51011 jim writes: > The sense I am getting is the only thing people here are interested in > is tiny little programs they can play with in emacs. That's fine if > thats all you're interested in. Forth was developed for measurement and control applications on machines with few resources, and while it can do other things, imho that's what it's best at. >What Im looking for is a serious toolchain to do some serious large >scale speculative work with -I can't even use what I've discovered in >the forth world for the proof of concept work I need to do. > It's looking like I'm going to have to use plain C What kinds of programs are you thinking about? For speculative and exploratory programming I usually find it better to use higher level or scripting languages (Python is nice for that). C and Forth are for when you need higher efficiency and resource control. > I've looked around but my conclusion is: Forth is stuck in 1980 and > far too small and introverted to deal with. Nobody is using it because > nobody has made it usable. Chicken and egg. I personally don't find the toolchain to be an issue. Forth with a much fancier toolchain would still be Forth, requiring its usual careful and painstaking approach to programming. By comparison, with Python, I can throw code at the screen intuitively, and get something that runs slowly but works. That's usually enough to test the idea, and often enough to be usable directly if the problem requirements are not too large. If I need it to run fast, this may indicate poor taste on my part, but these days I generally prefer C++ to C.