old threaded languages, was Re: Symbolics

From: Jay West <west_at_tseinc.com>
Date: Tue Feb 29 20:50:35 2000

Someone wrote...
> There was an issue of BYTE dedicated to threaded languages; it's been a
> while since I read it, but IIRC it was pretty much devoted to FORTH.
> There was also a book which somehow was related to the articles that
> went through the process of building your own FORTH. Unfortuantely, I
> don't have a copy of that.

The first OS type design project I was ever offered was to write a run time
forth interpreter and complete OS environment for it on Microdata Reality
computers (subsequently McDonnell Douglas Computer Systems). As I recall
they had some type of medical oriented accounting or business package
written in forth and they wanted to make it run (without another underlying
OS) on the Reality platform (which they owned). They offered me almost
triple what I was currently making to be the lead engineer on the project. I
was absolutely salivating at the thought of doing a complete OS design from
scratch, but in subsequent interviews it was obvious to me that they would
likely let me go once the project was written so I didn't take it. I've
never touched forth since then.

This is almost 20 year old memory cells trying to activate here, but I
thought Forth was generally implemented by "compilation" into a non-standard
pCode which was then run interpretively by a stack oriented run time engine.
Thus, I would have said it was a stack oriented language. But I guess it
depends on if you're looking at the language itself or how it is normally
executed?

Jay West
Received on Tue Feb 29 2000 - 20:50:35 GMT