Re: Naked LUA

[Jim Whitehead II <jnwhiteh@...>]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Everett L Williams II
<rett@classicnet.net> wrote:
> Forth has an amazing history. It was used for a lot of the early space
> probes that had tiny processors with minimal RAM. Some of those have been
> running now for decades, so Forth is pretty sturdy. The problems that I saw
> with Forth when I investigated it were that it is what I call a write-only
> language. As the dictionary builds up, very little is written in base Forth
> primitives, so the code has almost zero actual Forth commands in it, and
> everyone builds their own set of dictionary favorites. I think a better
> description would be that it is a personal or project level language, highly
> unique to it's environment. That is not necessarily a disadvantage, but it
> does mean that receiving code from other sources without a thorough
> documentation of the dictionary entries may be quite frustrating. On the
> other hand, outside of cold assembler or object code, I don't know of any
> system that is much more compact. I remember seeing some studies (from many
> long years ago) that showed that Forth programs were often more compact than
> hand written Assembler. As was noted elsewhere, Forth is also supposedly the
> easiest language to port from processor to processor, as the core primitives
> are infinitesimal. It is my understanding that back in the day, Forth was
> often the first language of any kind on many processors, because it took so
> much less effort than writing an Assembler.

Rett, I'm sorry but could you please stop posting to the Lua mailing
list in HTML format? It's incredibly distracting and flies in the face
of good netiquette. The request has already been made previously in
the thread, although it may have gotten lost in the pure irony of the
request. I find it incredibly distracting to read your responses
because they are formatted how YOU want to see them rather than
allowing me to format and style them as I see fit in my own email
client.

Thank you,

- Jim