Re:milliForth
by RodgerTheGreat on Monday November 06, 2023 @10:09AM
(#38163620)
The main advantage of a miniature Forth like this over BLC, Lisp, Brainfuck, etc, is that Forth grants low-level access to the hardware; you can easily bootstrap from it to something indistinguishable from a feature-rich Forth with a full suite of metaprogramming capabilities, or implement an entire operating system on top of it.
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Nothing is stopping Lisp from having low-level access to hardware.
Is low-level hardware access part of the language definition [1] ?
Miniature Lisps are similar to Forth in this way. Having worked with both I'm inclined to favour Lisps for providing cleaner structure and abstractions for code and data to build up from, with low overhead despite the superfical differences. (See SectorLisp2 (436 bytes) vs SectorForth (491 bytes) size: https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/).
Lisps are given low-level hardware access primitives (peek/poke etc) when they are designed for bootstrapping an OS, and low-level OS primitives (such as system calls) when they are designed for bootstrapping a rich environment on a different OS. Basically the same primitives as Forth for the same purposes.