Hacker News Reader

Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

For me I got interested in it while getting into some retro computing stuff during the pandemic, curious where others are getting that itch from!

[1] Playing with open boot on my old iBook power PC - realizing it's a forth

[2] Playing with durexForth on c64 emulators

[3] collapse-os recently switching to forth.

View on HN

BTw, is there a way to have numbers bigger than 2^15-1 in collapseOS'Forth, or under 8/16 bit Forths?

Didn't get deep enough to need to test those limits, but I assume they would need to be hand rolled.

Qemu PPC uses Forth too.

Because OpenFirmware, the more or less standard bootloader of PowerPC and Sparc specified forth as it's command language. Even let you write PCI option ROMs in forth to have ISA independent boot drivers.

I thought I bricked my 21 year old iBook and a forth command saved me. They don’t teach you that in algebra school.

Open Firmware written by Mitch Bradley is actually just a byte-code Forth custom extended to be the system firmware. :)

So it's not that the language was specified but rather the language is the Firmware. By using byte-codes for the Forth keywords and allowing new wordlists to be created and extended you get a nice virtual machine that has the low-level chops to let you write device drivers and such, as you mentioned, while keeping the object code very small.

It quite clever. Unfortunately Forth itself is so "other" that it can never win the popularity contest. However like Lisp it is one of those mind expanding paradigms that should be sampled for the insights into minimalist computing that it provides.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com