[HN Gopher] Retro: A modern, pragmatic Forth
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Retro: A modern, pragmatic Forth
Author : Drakonis
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-07-11 17:04 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.retroforth.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.retroforth.org)
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Hacker news may be giving this site the hug of death.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230711163359/https://retrofort...
|
| Retro is an interesting Forth platform because it has numerous
| features not present in more traditional Forth systems, such as
| the ability to create closures and first class literals while
| still maintaining compactness that would be expected of a Forth
| system.
|
| It was originally meant for desktop scripting but has been ported
| to tiny devices like microcontrollers.
|
| It is worth a look if you are even mildly curious about Forth
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I would love a Forth with a type system. I don't know if that
| is heretical, but I'd love a higher-order type system for when
| you are several meta-words deep. Disclaimer: I've only used
| Factor on Project Euler problems.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > I would love a Forth with a type system. I don't know if
| that is heretical [...].
|
| Jack Woehr (of the ANS Forth committee) and Mitch Bradley (of
| Open Firmware fame) think it's old hat[1], so guess not.
| (They also think it probably won't work though.)
|
| In general, people have tried a lot of times; there's a
| number of _postfix Lisps_ with type systems--Kitten mentioned
| elsethread, ActorForth[2], etc.; a low-level _Forth_ , as in
| identidally sized cells on stack and no automatic memory
| management, I don't think has been done to completeness (IIRC
| either Forth, Inc. or MPE have a standing offer for any
| that's able to process their legacy code even just for stack
| checking), but then C wouldn't be complete by that standard
| either (and Rust far too limiting).
|
| Honestly I'm not sure how well it would work. In C, you get a
| great deal of utility out of compound types, and classic
| cell-oriented Forth kind of sucks at even mildly complex
| datastructures--they are certainly possible, but being unable
| to manipulate them as values on the stack makes things quite
| unnatural. (And that's where I draw the line between Forths
| proper and "postfix Lisps" like PostScript, Joy, and Factor,
| as such manipulation doesn't seem feasible without some sort
| of automatic memory management.)
|
| [1] https://github.com/ForthHub/discussion/issues/79#issuecom
| men...
|
| [2] https://github.com/ActorForth/ActorForth
| vanderZwan wrote:
| While not quite a Forth, Kitten _is_ a stack language:
|
| https://kittenlang.org/
| jwmcq wrote:
| I've only used Forth briefly, but one of the things I loved
| about it is that it almost has the opposite of a type system
| - everything is just 'memory' - but you just build words
| around that and barely even notice.
|
| I've seen people recommend C as a way to "get closer to the
| hardware", but I think we all know that that's not really
| been a thing for longer than most of us have been alive.
| Forth, though? Maybe!
| [deleted]
| vegabook wrote:
| Forth is the only language I have dabbled with that feels
| _lower level_ than assembler itself.
| klardotsh wrote:
| I'm slowly working on one. The repo is a mess and the
| examples don't actually run (they're sketches of where I'm
| trying to go; the unit tests in the Zig source are a better
| idea of where I'm actually at so far), but I'm attempting to
| slap a "minimum viable "does this shape align with this other
| shape" type of type system" onto a loosely-FORTH-inspired
| stack machine with some modern amenities with Gale.
| https://sr.ht/~klardotsh/gale/ (or for the GitHub fans,
| https://github.com/klardotsh/gale)
| TapamN wrote:
| Might not be quite what you're thinking of, but for typed
| Forth, there's StrongForth, which is statically typed. I
| wrote a Forth-based scripting system for Dreamcast homebrew,
| and used StrongForth's type system in it. I would run and
| edit the scripts live on the console, and the static typing
| was a big help to prevent errors that could crash the system
| (since the game ran under a single process, and did not use
| the MMU).
|
| https://www.stephan-becher.de/strongforth/intro.htm
| poldy wrote:
| Personally I prefer Dr. Becher's follow-on project,
| StrongForth.f, which is just a library to load into a
| standard system like gforth (which is probably in your OS's
| package repo).
|
| http://www.arestlessmind.org/2013/08/17/
| mk12 wrote:
| smaddox is working on one called Dawn:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dawn-lang.org
|
| There hasn't been an update in over a year but I hope it's
| still going because it looked really interesting.
| tengwar2 wrote:
| There are a few stack-based languages that you might enjoy.
| Pop-11 is a typed open stack language roughly at the level of
| Common Lisp. RPL (originally "reverse Polish Lisp") is an
| interpretive stack based language on some HP calculators.
| [deleted]
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Cool beans. The literate coding system they're using (Unu) is a
| bit primitive, but it's _GREAT_ that they 're using one at all.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > The literate coding system they're using
|
| We need a new name for this kind of thing[1] because it's not
| really literate programming - you can't re-order your code
| blocks in the literate source files and have them come out in
| the right place in the code source files which is, I think, a
| key part of it being literate programming. Don't get me wrong -
| I use this a lot with the various *occos - but it needs a name
| of its own.
|
| [1] Assuming we don't already have one that I've missed.
| crc_ wrote:
| I'd love to have a better name for this, and am quite willing
| to change my description of it when I find one.
| dllthomas wrote:
| Sadly, I think the new name for this kind of thing has been
| "literate programming" for the past 20 years at least, while
| the literate programming that Knuth described has been
| renamed something like "the literate programming that Knuth
| described".
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| I think Docco was when that approach acquired some kind of
| popularity? So 2010 or so[1].
|
| Of course Haskell has had its "literate format" since
| forever (ETA: the Haskell 1.2 report[2], dated March 1992,
| has a description in an appendix), and it became mildly
| popular for Haskell blogging when blogs caught on, but its
| name was always accompanied by a side note that in Haskell
| you don't really need to reorder things (kind of true).
|
| [1] https://github.com/jashkenas/docco/commit/9b666b77c476f
| d76b9...
|
| [2] http://haskell.org/definition/haskell-report-1.2.ps.gz
| dllthomas wrote:
| I recall, on first encountering Literate Haskell at some
| point after 2010, mentally comparing it to something I
| thought I recalled from earlier in the perl ecosystem (on
| top of being vaguely aware of Knuth's stuff, although I
| hadn't actually read up on it at that point - at this
| point I have a copy on my desk).
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| POD? I've only encountered people using it to embed
| manpages into their single-file scripts, even if it turns
| out that the documentation[1] doesn't consider this the
| canonical use case and demonstrates something much more
| like LH. But then I've never done much Perl.
|
| [1] https://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn#PODs:-Embedded-
| Documentatio...
| dllthomas wrote:
| I don't think it would have been POD (which I agree isn't
| the same thing) but maybe. It's been a while.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It's in the interesting overlap space with Notebooks. I don't
| know if that is a name you'd want to reuse for "non-
| reorderable literate programming", especially as more
| Notebooks move the other direction and support cell
| reordering.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > The literate coding system they're using (Unu) is a bit
| primitive, but it's GREAT that they're using one at all.
|
| There's an old tradition of annotating Forth code with
| documentation: code would go into even-numbered 64x16-character
| "blocks", accompanying documentation into odd-numbered "shadow
| blocks", and on e.g. a VGA you could even view them at the same
| time.
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Seems like something is wrong with the site. I'm unable to reach
| it.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I think it's getting more requests than the site owner
| expected.
| danjoredd wrote:
| same
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _RetroForth 2021.1_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168640 - Feb 2021 (52
| comments)
|
| _Retro: A Modern, Pragmatic Forth_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19997008 - May 2019 (50
| comments)
|
| _Retro: Neat use of ports as high-level API from inside a VM
| (stack language)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764962
| - June 2015 (1 comment)
| genpfault wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230711163359/https://retrofort...
| mikewarot wrote:
| http://www.retroforth.org/ seems to work just fine
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Works no longer.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks- let's try it for now (changed from
| https://www.retroforth.org/)
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(page generated 2023-07-11 23:00 UTC)