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To: no-s
APL was an impressive “language” that was probably as tight with code as FORTH.

I never used APL but saw it in Byte magazine, but I did use FORTH.

These are very different languages. APL was tight from its symbolic structure, as I recall, while FORTH was tight due to incredibly recursive code that could be interpreted (including inline assembly language) or compiled.

It was technically possible to have FORTH be smaller than any compiled program because no compiler would do microrecursion to eliminate redundancy, while the FORTH programmer did this by nature and need.

Those were some good days. I remember being in high school and having saved up $150 for an amazing FORTH environment in the 1980s.

66 posted on 05/20/2020 2:06:27 PM PDT by ConservativeMind (Trump: Befuddling Democrats, Republicans, and the Media for the benefit of the US and all mankind.)
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To: ConservativeMind
Those were some good days. I remember being in high school and having saved up $150 for an amazing FORTH environment in the 1980s.

Oh, heck yeah. Admittedly when I first learned FORTH I tried to recreate all sorts of familiar APL and Lisp idiom, lots of fun, but eventually I grokked the beauty of the scratchpad vernacular. In the early 80's I bought an original IBM PC and sprang for an LMI FORTH cross compiler. Between FORTH and the DOS disassembler (which would also assemble, heheh) I had a marvelous time discovering 8088 bugs.

To this day I kick myself for not taking that FORTH programming job at NRAO in '82...

81 posted on 05/20/2020 8:32:09 PM PDT by no-s
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