Re:Zkeme80 – A Forth-Based OS for the TI-84+ Calculator
by flohofwoe on Sunday January 20, 2019 @05:32AM
(#18952352)
I wouldn't say it's easier to write Forth than C, but it's definitely more suited to resource-limited 8-bit systems with very little RAM.
IMHO Forth is more like an even more reduced Lisp, a "reverse Lisp" if you want, because of Forth's stack architecture (instead of (+ 1 2) in Lisp to add the number 1 and 2, you would write "2 1 +" in Forth, this puts the numbers 2 and 1 on the "stack", and then executes the word "+", which takes the topmost 2 numbers from the stack, adds them, and puts the result back on the stack.
So you get many advantages of Lisp (building complex programs incrementally from very simple building blocks), but in a much more reduced package which can even run on 8-bit computers with just a few KB of memory.
IMHO Forth is more like an even more reduced Lisp, a "reverse Lisp" if you want, because of Forth's stack architecture (instead of (+ 1 2) in Lisp to add the number 1 and 2, you would write "2 1 +" in Forth, this puts the numbers 2 and 1 on the "stack", and then executes the word "+", which takes the topmost 2 numbers from the stack, adds them, and puts the result back on the stack.
So you get many advantages of Lisp (building complex programs incrementally from very simple building blocks), but in a much more reduced package which can even run on 8-bit computers with just a few KB of memory.