Re: What's right with FORTH and wrong with c.l.f.

Richard Owlett wrote:

> {Grasshopper, capitalization in subject line significant :}
>
> What is so right with Forth that it *OVERRIDES* ALL negative comments?
>
> Obviously the :  ; pair.

Actually, I've been doing occasional work on a Forth variant with a
different compiler/interpreter that doesn't even have that, but has a
Reverse Polish naming approach. The basic idea, before syntactic
sugar, is that it compiles left to right in the usual way, building up
anonymous secondaries. Any unrecognised token terminates the current
anonymous secondary and is assigned as its name, and a new anonymous
secondary starts. At the end of the source string the final anonymous
secondary is closed off and run. Before syntactic sugar, ANY source is
valid!

This loses a lot of what most Forths are aiming for, like the other
defining words and maybe even immediate words, but I was just
testbedding something that doesn't need or want them anyway, so
workarounds are good enough there. For further details, see
http://users.beagle.com.au/peterl/furphy.html.
(One possible variant:
terminate all anonymous secondaries with branches back to the
beginning so they default to infinite loops, and provide a conditional
return as the only essential explicit control construct.) P.M.Lawrence.