Easy Forth
Learning and science
programming language tutorial
SHOW HN2015
122points
24comments
#193of 2,565 in 2015
Top 8%of 2015 by points
How HN took it
MixedNo clear lean
2 positive, 3 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 3 critical, out of 11 comments about the project. Thread score 0.00.
Idea: 0 for, 3 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Clear, easy to follow introduction to Forth
From 3 comments
Everything is great, simple, and easy to understand, and then I get to that Snake example and the code is nearly unreadable.
zatkin on HNThis looks amazing! Thank you. I've been meaning to learn Forth since forever now.
tonyonodi on HNI often use dc(1) so my first instinct was to type "1 2 3 +" into the input without intermediate linebreaks. I was delighted to see that this was correctly understood to mean…
vive-la-liberte on HN
Objections
Postfix notation is hard to read for complex expressions
From 3 comments
Forth programs are very compact. And so are Forth intepreters. Great for 1970s PCs with memories as small as 8K. But postfix programs are hard to understand. An hour later and…
peter303 on HNThat's too trivial an example. When you get something more complex, the difference becomes clearer. Can you parse the following easily? c_z x * s_z y * s_y * c_y z * + c_x * c_z…
TazeTSchnitzel on HNPostfix isn't hard to understand. Postifix with no syntactic delimitation is hard to understand. The problem with Forth is that although we undersatnd what each word does in…
kazinator on HN
Snake example is hard to read
From 2 comments
Everything is great, simple, and easy to understand, and then I get to that Snake example and the code is nearly unreadable.
zatkin on HNThe Snake code is more complex than it needs to be -- example: defining directions as constants from 1 to 4 and then using IF on the direction, instead of defining directions as…
abecedarius on HN
Requests
Mobile input field steals focus when scrolling
From 1 comment
I often use dc(1) so my first instinct was to type "1 2 3 +" into the input without intermediate linebreaks. I was delighted to see that this was correctly understood to mean…
vive-la-liberte on HN
Questions
Why false is 0 and true is -1 in Forth
From 1 comment
This is an enjoyable read! I've been coming across mentions of Forth much more often lately, so it feels satisfying being able to get a sense of it. One thing that caught my…
danbolt on HN
Alternatives named
GNU Forth
From 2 comments
Not directly a solution, but there is GNU Forth for Android. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gnu.gforth&hl=e
brudgers on HNIf you really insist on having an enum for your directions, what you could do is something like this: (assuming 2s complement and TRUE being ~0) ``` : DIREQ DIRECTION @ = ; :…
to3m on HN
8th
From 1 comment
Fun environment. A couple of weeks ago I installed 8th to learn a Forth as a hobby. (It promised iOS integration, so it might even be useful. I'm not there yet. :-) )
berntb on HN