Starting Forth

The sequel, _Thinking Forth_ (<a href="http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/</a>) is available free online, in PDF form. (After going out of print, it was scanned and OCR'd with the author's blessing...quite a compliment.) It's less about how to program with Forth, and more about things Forth taught Leo Brodie about designing programs for maintainability, (re)factoring, and the like.

My first summer job while at University was with a small company in the west of England, Micross (<a href="http://www.microssautomation.com/index.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.microssautomation.com/index.php</a>), writing industrial laundry control software, in Forth, targeting Windows NT. We used the MPE Forth system (<a href="http://www.mpeforth.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mpeforth.com/</a>), which was highly extensible - when you needed to add more of the Win32 API, you'd edit various files that shipped with the package and recompile the entire thing :)<p>The company had standardized on Forth throughout their operation, so regardless of the hardware you were using, anything from a PIC-based counting system to the Windows servers, you only needed to know one language to understand the code. Clever stuff.

I have never used Forth but it seems like a really language. It combines very high level constructs with the ability to be embedded in systems that barely have an operating system.<p>Now, if they could solve the problem that every Forth system is customized by the Forth programmer and so the entire language lacks standards, it would be amazing. Also, if you could add enough syntactic sugar to make it look sort-of like C or perl, you would have "the next big thing".