Hugh Perkins writes: ...
I didnt have a real PC, just a ZX Spectrum. It wasnt real Forth, just Spectrum Forth. It was kindof fun, but a little disappointing not to be able to do anything useful with it. ...
Oh, Forth on Sinclair was as decent Forth as any Forth. Indirect threaded language, with "paging" of programs, and most of the system writen in Forth itself. Nothing to be ashamed of. The Z80 processor was less adapted to this sort of interpreters, machines based on Motorola 6809 more; the Forth "inner interpreter" was there slightly more than 1 instruction... It was an excellent processor, much better that 6502. God knows why the other one made such career. In general, the languages on Spectrum, then on Apple, etc., belong to the *proud* history of comp. sci., we've got Lisp, and Prolog (the micro- ... stuff), APL, and some very exquisite Basic's. Of course, also Pascal and C. And even a computer algebra program/language (mu-simp). So, don't say that you hadn't a "real" PC. It is like saying: "I don't have a real car, only a bicycle". A bicycle is a usable device, sometimes much faster than a car. We won't rekindle the 8-bit machines, but I do not regret passing some time on them. For teaching they were much more useful than mainframes. But I am afraid that we got very far not only from Haskell, but also from café. Jerzy Karczmarczuk