Forth Programming Language Profile

Forth

Forth is an imperative stack-based programming language, and a member of the class of extensible interactive languages. It was created by Charles Moore in 1970 to control telescopes in observatories using small computers. Because of its roots, Forth stresses efficiency, compactness, flexible and efficient hardware/software interaction.

Forth has a number of properties that contrast it from many other programming languages. In particular, Forth has no inherent keywords and is extensible. It is both a low level and high level language. It has the interesting property of being able to compile itself into a new compiler, debug itself and to experiment in real time as the system is built. Forth is an extremely flexible language, with high portability, compact source and object code, and a language that is easy to learn, program and debug. It has an incremental compiler, an interpreter and a very fast edit-compile-test cycle. Forth uses a stack to pass data between words, and it uses the raw memory for more permanent storage. It also lets coders write their own control structures.

FACTS

Type of Language: Procedural, stack-oriented, reflective, concatenative
Designed by: Charles H. Moore
Public Release: 1970
License: –
Website: –

RECOMMENDED OPEN SOURCE BOOKS

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR DEVELOPERS

Forth Compilers – lists non-commercial Forth compilers.

USEFUL RESOURCES

Forth Interest Group – the interest group has been dissolved, but the site contains a wealth of useful information.

RECOMMENDED BOOK TO BUY