From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2002-12-06T07:34:50+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] ratlast 0.1 -- embedded FORTH in Ruby

On Fri, 6 Dec 2002 07:57, Mark Probert wrote:

> Most of all, it is a -lot- of fun to use!
>
> $ cat ex1.rb
> require 'Atlast'
> t = Atlast.new
>
> t.eval(": linear ( a b -- )  create swap , , does> dup >r @ * r> 4 + @ +
> ;") t.eval("3 17 linear aline")

Ah, yes, I can see how that's so much more intuitive than ...

   def linear(x)
       3 * x + 17
   end

Only ribbing you, there, but you have to admit the FORTH code tends to obscure 
what's going on just a little :-). 

It reminds me of Postscript code (which I've only ever written maybe 1000 
lines of altogether).  Probably because of the direct stack-based approach.

I bought a book on FORTH a few years ago, but never got around to playing with 
it, because something else distracted me.

I seem to recall reading a rumour that the boot code for Sun workstations was 
written in FORTH, but never found out whether that was true.

H.