Table of Contents
[hemmerling] FORTH 1/7
Related pages:
Standards & Guides
- “FIG Forth Model” by Forth Interest Group, 1978.
- “FORTH77”, 1977, just an interim version of the later “FORTH79”
- “FORTH78”, 1978, just an interim version of the later “FORTH79”.
- “FORTH79”, 1979.
- “FORTH83”, 1983.
- “ANS Forth” aka “ANS94 FORTH”, 1994.
- “ISO Forth” ( = ANS FORTH ), 1997.
- “Forth 200x”, “Forth2012”.
Famous Quotations and Statements
Famous Quotations, by Chuck Moore
- “I started the same time as Bill Gates. He took a different strategy. He was selling operating systems and I didn’t believe in operating systems. I was selling applications and I could only sell as many applications as I could program; or as Forth, Inc. could program. Boy did I miss the boat there. We could’ve sold Forth as an operating system, as a programming language, as a development system and we didn’t. So I guess he deserves the fifty billion dollars or hundred billion or whatever he’s got. But I had the fun”.
- “Forth is free to reinvent the wheel, and I think that is a marvelous concept. No one should ever be afraid to reinvent the wheel, and we do it every day”.
- “About a thousand instructions seems about right to me to do about anything. To paraphrase the old legend that any program with a thousand instructions can be written in one less. All programs should be a thousand instructions long”.
- “A Forth application can take 1% the code employed by the same application written in C”.
Famous Statements
- EN.Wikiquote "Alan Kay" - “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware”.
- “Non-FORTH developers are stuck in a pattern of thinking, of thinking in variables, constants, functions, and structures. Think in words and what's happening on the stack, variables and constants are not the core business in FORTH. In small programs you can do without, if you want to. This will come at the expense of readability. If a non-FORTH developers gives a FORTH developer a bit of forth code in PASCAL style, then the FORTH developer can show how to convert this to a stack solution”.
- “ANS Forth was a great idea” ?!
?? - Quora "Welche Programmiersprache ist Deiner Meinung nach die wichtigste, die man lernen sollte?" 2017 - “Andreas Neuner, C Entwickler seit 1985, jetzt lieber Forth: ... aber FORTH ist eine Sprache, ein Betriebssystem und eine Philosophie die nicht nur vollumfänglich von einer Person verstanden und in alle Richtungen erweitert werden kann (so als würde man seinen C++ Compiler erweitern und als würde er dann auch zur Laufzeit noch zur Verfügung stehen) sondern sie kann auch in wenigen Tagen selbstständig von einer einzelnen Person entwickelt werden (das probier doch mal mit C++). Auch wenn man letztlich nicht mit FORTH programmiert, das Wissen wie man solche Sachen machen kann ermöglicht einen z.B. einen inline Debugger in seinen C Code zu implementieren, oder ausführbare Datenstrukturen in der Datenbank abzulegen … und vieles mehr”.
Reputation
- “Write-only programming language” - “Da in den ersten Jahren von Forth auch der Platz für Quellcode auf Speichermedien stark begrenzt war, hatte sich Forth leider den Ruf einer Write-only-Programmiersprache zugezogen. Es braucht ein wenig Disziplin, um schön lesbare Forth-Programme zu schreiben” ( heise publishing ).
- “Read only Language” - “And when you wrote in it, it was hard to go back and look at it and determine what you actually how it was actually working” ( Pete Peterson ).
- “FORTH allows the programmer to re-form the language itself until it fits the problem, a concept akin to object-oriented programming. However, FORTH also allows you to change the base language itself. Because of this, it becomes a maintenance nightmare and is thus probably the purest expression of the concept of internal discipline, where the emphasis is on the one-time solution of the problem rather than the maintenance of that solution” ( Bruce Eckel ).
- “If you know a Forth, you know one Forth”.
- “To find your own Forth is a personal quest, similar to find the proper diet to reduce your own body weight”.
- “Forth - The programming language for low-fat computing”.
- Explanation by experts: “low fat” means “lean and mean”, the vice-versa of “obese”. Before people worried about carbs they worried about excessive fast intake.
My personal Historical Conclusions about the fall of FORTH
- Turbo-Pascal killed FORTH on CP/M and MSDOS. Pascal was dominant on MacOSClassic in the early period. C and GFABasic were dominant on ATARI and AMIGA. Microsoft-C, Borland's Delphi and Turbo-C became dominant on MSDOS in the late 1980th to mid 1990th, i.e. prior to the rise of Windows. C was dominant on Windows and Linux from start. Java was “the” OO language for browser applets, desktop and server applications on Windows and Linux at start, while later it turned into an inportant server application language. C became dominant on bare metal embedded systems since the mid-2000th. Javascript & Python are pretty much killing C everywhere. Node.js and MicroPython are the Turbo-Pascals of today. ESP32Forth might be the last chance for a success of FORTH, especially as SmartHome language, on KonCony KC868-A4, KC868-A8,KC868-A32 and maybe the UDOO KEY.
Organisations, People, Companies
Organisations
- Netherlands / Holland.
- HCC!Forth interessegroep, Netherlands.
- Germany.
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- Russia.
- RuFIG — Russian Forth Interest Group, Russia.
- Taiwan.
- Archive.org "FigTaiwan" ( - 2020-11-30 ).
- UK / Great Britain.
- FIG UK ( United Kingdom Forth Interest Group ).
- “Other FIGs”.
- USA.
- The former FIG - Forth Interest Group ( forth.org ).
- Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group (SVFIG).
t
FORTH People
FORTH Community People with historical Importance
- Hugh Aguilar .
- Ray Duncan.
- Charles H. Moore ( Chuck Moore )
- archive.org "Charles H. Moore ( Chuck Moore )" ( - 2016-04-16 ).
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- “About a thousand instructions seems about right to me to do about anything. To paraphrase the old legend that any program with a thousand instructions can be written in one less. All programs should be a thousand instructions long”.
- The CPUSHACKmuseum.
- Jeff Fox ( died in 2011 ).
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Jeff Fox, UltraTechnology "Streaming Video Theater"⇒ Videos on Google webspace are deleted.
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- Mike Perry and Henry Laxen.
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- “While there, I met a couple of guys and we decided to strike out on our own and formed a company called Orthocode. It had a brief existence, and the main impact it had on me was that I learned a new programming language called Forth. I became rather fluent in Forth, and actually wrote several articles about it in the Forth Dimensions magazine, as well as gave a few talks at various conferences. It was enough to attract the attention of Rick Meyer, who worked for a small company called Friends-Amis. They were working on the worlds first hand held computer, and were using Forth to do the programming of the operating system. The HHC (Hand Held Computer) actually made the Oct 1981 cover of Byte Magazine. Eventually Friends-Amis was acquired by Masushita of Japan, but by then I had met my best friend and future partner, Alex Lusthak”.
- “Together we started a company that eventually was called Paradise Systems. We made a lot of wrong turns along the way, but eventually our product line was video cards and chips for he IBM PC and its clones. At the time, IBM had just announced their EGA (Enhanced Graphics Adapter) which used 7 custom chips. My partner, Alex, redesigned it so that it only need one custom chip, instead of seven. Our chip was being used in almost every IBM PC clone then on the market, from Olivetti to Compaq. We were manufacturing the chips in Taiwan and Japan for about $3 per chip, and selling them for $35 per chip. This is what is called, good margins! Then in 1986, Western Digital, a public company that made hard disk drives, decided it wanted to get into the video business, and decided it would be cheaper to buy Paradise Systems than start from scratch. Thus at the ripe old age of 33, I retired on September 15th, 1987. I like to call myself self-unemployed”.
- Elisabeth Rather.
FORTH Community People of 2021-2022
- Chris Curl.
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- Facebook "Peter Forth", German from Brazil.
- Supporter and organizer of the Facbook Group "Forth2020".
- Organizer of the monthly “Forth2020 - Zoom Meetings” events.
- Dan Golding, USA.
- Facebook "AI & Robotics" - Membership just by invitation of Facebook "Don Golding".
- Michel Jean.
- Facebook "Michel Jean" - Experts told me, that he i experienced with F-PC Forth on MSDOS.
- John Hardy.
- GitHub "monsonite/MINT/MINT.asm" - “MINT Minimal Interpreter for the Z80”.
- Andrew Holme.
- Klaus Kohl-Schöpe, Germany.
- Francois Laagel, France.
- Brad Nelson.
- LinkedIn "Demitri Peynado", UK - SystemVerilog specialist.
- Facebook "Joerg Plewe" - “The” specialist for Forth on 68K & ATARI-ST.
- Bill Ragsdale.
- Ilya Tarasov - Professor in Moscow, Russia.
- Facebook "Инна Тарасова" ( Inna Tarasova ).
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- Publications:
- “Chen-hanson Ting” ( RIP, in 2022-06 ).
- Facebook "Tom Zimmer(Tommy Z)" ( “win32forth” ).
- Facebook "Rick Vannorman" ( “MVP F32 Forth” ).
Special FORTH People of 2021
- Josh Stone.
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- GitHub "jephthai / EvilVM" - “EvilVM compiler for information security research tools. The project is built around a native code Forth compiler that is deployed as a position independent shellcode. It provides a platform for remote code execution, useful in information security context”.
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Events
Forth Day
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- “Forth Days”.
- Online Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group (SVFIG) "Forth Day 2020", 2020-11-21.
- Online Forth Day 2021, 2021-11-20.
- Online Forth Day 2022, 2022-11-19.
- Online Forth Day 2023, 2023-11-18.
- Monthly meetings. You have to join the Meetup event ( on 4.th Saturday of a month, 9:30AM PDT ( = 17:30 UTC+1 or 18:30 UTC+1 with daylight savings, double check !!) - 12:00PM PDT to get Zoom URL and passwort sent.
- Forth.org "Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group (SVFIG) - General Meeting Information - “SVFIG typically meets on the fourth Saturday of each month this year with the following exceptions noted below on the third Saturday” ⇒ 2023: The meetings in November 2023 + December 2023 are on 3rd, not 4th Saturday.
Forth-Tagungen
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- 1984 .. 2012.
- 2013 .. 2019.
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- “on air ... einige Sitzungen werden live auf twitch ( Twitch "4ther" ) gestreamed, aufgenommen und später auf youtube hochgeladen um kommende Generationen zu erfreuen”.
- The free online event “Forth Tagung 2020”, 2020-03-27 - 2020-03-29.
- The free online event “Forth Tagung 2021”, 2021-11-12 - 2021-11-14.
- The free online event “Forth Tagung 2022”, 2022-05-06 - 2022-05-08.
- The free online event “Forth Tagung 2023”, 2023-05-06 - 2023-05-07 - I participated.
- 2023-05-07 is general member meeting, no speeches.
- Archive.org "Forth Sommer 2022" ( - 2022-11-26 ), 2022-07-15 - 2022-07-17.
"EuroForth" & "Forth Standards Meeting"
Forth Events
- The rule for new participants of the “Forth Standards Meeting”: The first time, you are “observer” and may not vote. Thats ok! You may vote from the 2nd. meeting on .
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- “The long story. At EuroForth 2004 we had a workshop Forth 2005 about an update of the Forth standard”.
- “Forth standards meetings” 2005-2021, are held, in general, immediatly before the EuroForth conference.
- EuroForth.
- EuroForth ( euroforth.org ) (1985 - ).
- Document & data repositories:
- Online EuroForth 2021 - I participated.
- Online EuroForth 2022.
- EuroForth 2023, 2023-09-13 - 2023-09-17 in Rome, Italy.
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- Forth Wiki [Forth-eV Wiki] - 31c3 - The 31st Chaos Communication Congress, 2015 - “No video with supported format and MIME type found”.
- DokuWiki "Forth Wiki [Forth-eV Wiki] - EuroForth 2018 in Edinburgh" ⇒ “Chuck Moore Interview”.
- The free online conference EuroForth 2020.
- “Forth standard meeting”, 2020-09-01 - 2020-09-03.
- “EuroForth”, 2020-09-04 - 2020-09-06.
- The free online conference EuroForth 2021.
- “Forth standard meeting”, 2021-09-07 - 2021-09-09, 15:00-19:30 o'clock.
- “EuroForth”, 2021-09-10 - 2021-09-12, 15:00-19:30 o'clock.
- Registration started 2021-08-19.
- EuroForth "Program" - Agenda of EuroForth and Forth Standard Meeting, of the current event.
- EuroForth "Hotel Guests" - List of ( online ) participants, of the current event.
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- EuroForth Chat "Mattermost", Channel "Virtual Excursion" - Photo upload doesn't work with Firefox browser, but just with Google-Chrome on desktop PC.
- EuroForth Chat "Mattermost", Channel "Standard" - Here “Forth Meeting” are usually scheduled and announced to happen starting 21:00 UTC+2, e.g. 15:00-19:30 UTC+2 Forth Meeting, announcement of a workshop at 20:58 UTC+2 “Workshops will be starting in a few minutes in the Bar on the Topics Document Transpiling (Standard → HTML) and Parsable Stack Effect Notations”.
- Forth ( forth-standard.org ) - Infos about EuroForth 2021 & Forth Standard Meeting on the front page, in 2021-09.
- YouTube "4ther" - Recorded conference videos, no live conference video.
- Live conference:
- Twitch "4ther" - Conference video broadcasting.
- “http://euro.theforth.net/myEuroForth/XXXX” ⇒ “you can now edit your presentation details in the 'myEuroForth' - section”. XXXX is your personal EuroForth ID, the complete link is your “ticket” to the complete conference.
- BigBlueButton Server "ganymed.wodni.at" - Conference server. You are connected with proper by your personal “myEuroForth” link.
- The free online conference EuroForth 2022, 2022-09-16 - 2022-09-18.
- Twitch "4ther" - Conference video broadcasting ( announced ).
Forth People
Forth2020 - Zoom Meetings
The Events
- “Every 2nd. Saturday, 14:00 UTC” ( 2021-01 - ... ). Note that this time does not change due to summer daylight savings in some countries.
- Zoom.Forth2020 - Zoom Server Forwarding URL, pw “forth2020”.
- “Saturday, 12:00 UTC” ( 2021-09-04 ), “13:00” UTC ( 2022-01-15 - ). Note that this time does not change due to summer daylight savings in some countries.
- 2024-03-09.
- Saturday, 2024-08-10, 17:00 UTC+2.
Speeches
- Google Docs "Forth Threading Models on the Z80", 2021-08-14 by John Hardy.
Resources
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- GitHub "ForthWin / Forth2020UsersGroup" - “This space is dedicated to the members of the Forth Win Users Group in order to share their works and experiences with ForthWin”.
- YouTube "Forth2020" - Recordings of the ZOOM meetings.
Discontinued Series of historically important Events & Single Events
FORML (Forth Modification Laboratory)
FORML (Forth Modification Laboratory)
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- “FORML (Forth Modification Laboratory)”.
- “Since 1980, FIG has sponsored an annual conference called FORML (Forth Modification Laboratory)”
EuroFORML
- EuroFORML '85 conference in Settenfels Castle [near Heolbronn], 1985-10-25 - 1985-10-27.
- EuroFORML '87 conference in Settenfels Castle [near Heolbronn], 1987-09-18 - 1987-09-20.
Conference on Forth Applications 1981 - 1998
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- “Conference on Forth Applications” at the University of Rochester, UK.
- “In 1982 Lawrence Forsley founded the Institute for Applied Forth Research, now called simply the Forth Institute. This organization sponsored an annual Conference on Forth Applications at the University of Rochester, Rochester NY”.
- Archive.org "The Rochester Forth Conference 1981-1998" ( - 2007-12-30 ).
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- “ASYST Conference”, University of Rochester, NY, USA ( 1988-10-09 - 1988-10-11 ).
SIGFORTH Conferences 1989 - 1992
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- “FORTH: SIGFORTH Conference”.
- “In 1989, George Shaw and others formed an ACM Special Interest Group on Forth called SIGForth, which also sponsors a newsletter and an annual conference”.
- ACM Digital Library - Conferences "FORTH" - “FORTH '89”, “FORTH '90 and '91”, “FORTH '92”.
Real-Time Programming Convention 1988
- Forth Interest Group (FIG) "Forth Conferences" - Infos about FORTH conferences 1998 - 2013.
- “Real-Time Programming Convention”, sponsored by Forth Interest Group (FIG), 1988.
First Australian Forth Symposium 1988
- First Australian Forth Symposium 1988 at University of Technology Sydney, 1988-05-19 - 1988-05-20.
Resources
- Forth Interest Group (FIG) "Forth Conferences" - Infos about FORTH conferences 1998 - 2013.
Rolf Hemmerling's Ideas about FORTH
Comparison LUA versus FORTH
- LUA is 30 years old, FORTH is 50 years old, so both are not fashion languages ( LUA:FORTH = 1:1 ).
- They were both created by masterminds: LUA was created by Roberto, while FORTH was created by Chuck, with Elizabeth as FORTH entrepreneur. But as of 2021, both Chuck and Elizabeth are retired, while Roberto is still university professor ( LUA:FORTH = 2:1 ).
- LUA code looks like that of most other common programming languages, however proficient LUA users are known to be trained in “Thinking in Tables”, while FORTH users need to learn “Thinking in Forth”( LUA:FORTH = 3:2 in sum ).
- Both LUA and FORTH support sort of “Object Orientation”, but they are no plain OO languages ( LUA:FORTH = 3:2 still in sum, no points granted ).
- LUA 5.0,.. 5.4 releases of the 2000th-2010th are not that much backward compatible, which makes maintainance of libraries hard, while with FORTH there are too many incompatible implementations and standards, in comparison to C, Python, Java ( LUA:FORTH = 3:2 still in sum, no points granted ).
- LUA has several annual international conferences, FORTH has a single annual European conference and a German conference ( LUA:FORTH = 4:3 in sum ).
- LUA is written in C, FORTH can be written in C ( LUA:FORTH = 5:4 in sum ).
- LUA can be integrated in C/C++ applications and embedded systems as high-level scripting language, FORTH is the #1 high-level script language for embedded sytems ( LUA:FORTH = 6:5 in sum ).
- LUA never had a Usenet group at all, nor any mailing list in English language, Forth did and still does have 2 active Usenet groups and 2 active Facebook groups ( LUA:FORTH = 6:6 in sum ).
- LUA is one of the languages for participation in the “Google Summer of Code”, FORTH is not ( LUA:FORTH = 7:6 in sum ).
- LUA is mentioned in the last few years several times as a “Worst Programming Languages to Learn”, FORTH is not even mentioned and thats not a plus ( LUA:FORTH = 8:6 in sum ).
BASIC Forth & FULL Forth
- How about, like with PEARL - Process and Experiment Automatisation Realtime Language, have a “BASIC Forth” and a “FULL” Forth set of features and words?
Should I invest into Lua Development Skills ?
Reputation & Popularity
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- Python - 4 points, C - 4 points, Lisp (any except Clojure and Scheme) - 3 points, Forth - 3 points.
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- Python - 3240 points,... Forth - 41 points, Tcl - 34 points.
Job Offers
- Stepstone.DE "Microcontroller Jobs und Stellenangebote" - “Für Jobs im Bereich Microcontroller, die sich mit der Entwicklung der kleinen Steuergeräte befassen, benötigen Sie tief greifende Programmierkenntnisse in einer der Programmiersprachen C, Basic, Pascal, Forth oder C++. Jede dieser Sprachen bietet spezielle Vorteile, die in Abhängigkeit vom Einsatzzweck des Microcontrollers zutage treten. Wesentliche Kriterien sind hier die einfache Orientierung auf die eingesetzte Hardware oder die Robustheit der Sprache. Die begrenzte Größe des Programmspeichers in Microcontrollern erfordert ein schlankes, effizientes und fehlerresistentes Programm. Voraussetzung hierfür ist das tiefgründige und vollständige Verstehen der Aufgabe, welche der geplante Microcontroller erfüllen soll. Diese Aufgabe wird zunächst in ein abstraktes virtuelles Modell übersetzt, welches seinerseits als Grundlage für die eigentliche Programmierung dient”.
- Geekly articles weekly "Die seltensten und teuersten Programmiersprachen. Teil II" - Publication date unknown .
- ”Kürzlich habe ich für Habr-Leser ein wenig über Programmiersprachen wie Rust, Dart, Erlang recherchiert, um herauszufinden, wie selten sie auf dem russischen IT-Markt sind. Die Studie umfasste Sprachen: Forth, Ceylon, Scala, Perl, Cobol sowie einige andere Sprachen. Im Allgemeinen habe ich 10 Programmiersprachen analysiert”.
- “Viertens. Die Programmiersprache Forth erschien in den 70er Jahren. Jetzt ist der russische Markt nicht gefragt. Es gibt keine offenen Stellen bei Headhunter oder LinkedIn. Der Lebenslauf zeigte Sprachkenntnisse von 166 Spezialisten auf Headhunter und 25 auf LinkedIn. Die überwiegende Mehrheit der Bewerber verfügt über mehr als 6 Jahre Erfahrung. Spezialisten mit Forth-Kenntnissen verlangen ein Gehalt von 20.000 Rubel bis zu 500.000 Rubel”.
This is NOT ( about ) FORTH and not a FORTH Community
FOURTH-IR ( 4th-ir.com )- “Building the virtual workforce of the future. Artificial Intelligence for a smarter tomorrow”.AMPL -- The Rebasing Cryptocurrency "The FORTH token has arrived" ( ampleforth.org ).- ”
back and forth”. -
-
Postscript.- C2 Wiki "Forth Postscript Relationship" - “Postscript is a graphical page description language invented by ChuckGetsche and JohnWarnock (the President and CEO of Adobe). Its syntax looks a little bit like Forth, because it is derived from Forth; however, Postscript's internal implementation has nothing to do with Forth”.
- The song ”
Moving Forth”. Handwerker-Bewerten "Videothek World Forth in Eckental",FortherHauptstr. 35, D-90542 Eckental.
Appropriate OpenDirectory Directory Pages
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