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Language extensibility (was: Why is tcl broken?)

William Tanksley wtanksle at dolphin.openprojects.net
Thu Jul 1 15:20:36 EDT 1999 
On 01 Jul 1999 19:11:53 +0200, Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
>* William Tanksley

[I made the joking claim that Lisp was an improvement on Forth, then to
defuse criticism I claimed:]
>| (Yes, I know -- the ancestry goes the other way around: Lisp ->
>| Scheme -> Forth.)

>Huh? Forth dates back to the 60s, whereas Scheme is from 1975, and I'm
>quite unsure of whether Chuck Moore knew Lisp at all.

I don't think Forth is that old, certainly not in any usable form.  Here,
according to the history on www.forth.com, "the first program to be called
Forth was written in about 1970."  That substantiates what you're saying
about Scheme -- I'm a little suprised.  Okay, toss Scheme out of the
ancestry ;-).

Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth, got a BA in physics from MIT and went
into grad school at Stanford.  He claims to have taken classes from and
learned a lot from Lisp.

Forth is very much like Lisp, with the subtraction of memory management
and the addition of implicit parameter passing.  Forth is Lisp for people
who prefer "as simple as possible" to "but no simpler."  (And it IS a very
good language; I use it more than Scheme.)

A paragraph like that is neccesarily an oversimplification.  Perhaps I can
get away with saying that Forth learned more from Lisp than it did from
any other language existing at the time?  Yes, I think that's tenable.

>--Lars M.

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley
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