[COFF] Re: [TUHS] Porting the SysIII kernel: boot, config & device drivers

[Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>]

> On Dec 31, 2022, at 6:40 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> All true except for the Forth choice.  It's as bad, maybe worse, as 
> choosing Tcl for your language.  I've written a ton of Tcl but I
> need the Tk GUI part so I put up with Tcl to get it.  I'd never 
> push Tcl as a language that other people had to use.  Same thing
> with Forth.
> 
> I dunno what I'd pick, Perl in the old days, Python now (not that
> I care for Python but everyone can program it).  Just pick something
> that is trivial for someone to pick up.


(Moved to COFF) 

I rather like FORTH.  Its chief virtues are that it is both tiny and extensible.  It was developed as a telescope control language, as I recall, and in highly constrained environments gives you a great deal of expressivity for a teeny tiny bit of interpreter code.  I adored my HP 28S and still do: that was Peak Calculator, and its UI is basically a FORTH interpreter (which also, of course, functions just fine as an RPN calculator if you don't want to bother with flow control constructs).

But I also make the slightly more controversial claim that FORTH is just LISP stood up on end.

These days I think the right choice for those sorts of applications would be Micropython.  Yes, a full-on Python interpreter is heavyweight, but Micropython gives you a lot of functionality in (comparatively) little space.  It runs fine on a $4 Pi Pico, for instance, which has IIRC 256KB RAM.

And if you find yourself missing TCL, there's always Powershell, which is like what would happen if bash and TCL had a really ugly baby that just wouldn't shut up.  The amazing thing is that access to all the system DLLs makes it *almost* worth putting up with Powershell.

Adam