Re: [Haskell-cafe] G machine in FORTH

I always thought Forth was way cool, but I've never managed to get anything significant written in it. I think that Forth has echoes of the "point-free" style in Haskell, but Haskell is a lot friendlier. Is the Forth environment part of the hardware? If your Forth is just a threaded interpreter written in software then it seems wasteful to compile Haskell down to an interpreted environment. If it's part of the hardware then I think it would be (at the very least) an interesting exercise. Mike

Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:25:24 -0400 From: Andrew Harris Reply-To: Andrew Harris

Hi -

Brace yourself... I work in an environment where FORTH is still used.

I've been thinking about writing a G-machine interpreter in FORTH so that one could write Haskell like programs that would compile down and run "graph-reduction" style on the FORTH machine.

Many developers think FORTH is nice, but the language is so, shall we say, "terse".

I'm curious about what people think about this; having the expressiveness of a Haskell-like language that compiles to this environment might provide the best of both worlds, simple hardware architecture and an advanced programming language.

let me know what you think, -andrew