Forth (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:07, 8 May 2024

Revision as of 14:33, 18 May 2024

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{{Infobox programming language

| name = Forth

| paradigm = [[Concatenative programming language|concatenative]] ([[Stack-oriented programming|stack-based]]), [[Procedural programming|procedural]], [[Reflective programming|reflective]]

| year = {{start date and age|1970}}

| designer = [[Charles H. Moore]]

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}}

'''Forth''' is a [[Procedural programming|procedural]], [[Concatenative programming language|concatenative]], [[Stack-oriented programming|stack-oriented]] [[programming language]] and interactive [[integrated development environment]] designed by [[Charles H. Moore|Charles H. "Chuck" Moore]] and first used by other programmers in 1970. Although not an [[acronym]], the language's name in its early years was often spelled in [[all capital letters]] as ''FORTH''. The FORTH-79 and FORTH-83 implementations, which were not written by Moore, became ''[[de facto]]'' standards, and an official [[technical standard]] of the language was published in 1994 as ANS Forth. A wide range of Forth derivatives existed before and after ANS Forth. The [[free and open-source software]] [[Gforth]] implementation is actively maintained, as are several [[Commercial software|commercially]] supported systems.

Forth typically combines a compiler with an integrated command shell,{{efn|There are exceptions, such as Ulrich Hoffmann's preForth [http://www.euroforth.org/ef18/papers/hoffmann-slides.pdf][http://www.euroforth.org/ef18/papers/hoffmann.pdf] and Tom Zimmer's TCOM}} where the user interacts via [[subroutine]]s called ''words''. Words can be defined, tested, redefined, and debugged without recompiling or restarting the whole program. All syntactic elements, including variables, operators, and control flow, are defined as words. A [[stack (abstract data type)|stack]] is used to pass parameters between words, leading to a [[Reverse Polish Notation]] style.