Re: Sliderules, Logs, and Prodigies

[Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>]

Ben Laurie wrote:
> Timothy C. May wrote:
> > At 10:33 AM -0800 11/7/96, Dale Thorn wrote:

[snip]

> > And for those of you are not LISP or Scheme fans, the language FORTH also
> > uses Polish notation. RPN, in fact.

> I think claiming RPN for Forth is pushing it a little far. Admittedly it is
> stack-based (well, two-stack-based), and everything an operator can operate on
> is to the left, but the provision of arbitrary stack manipulation, "compile"
> mode (triggered by the '[' operator, if my memory serves) and so on make it
> rather a different beast.

FORTH has fallen out of favor for most PC users of the mid 1990's, but then again,
so have computer languages as a whole, since few persons write software today as
compared to the early 1980's.

But if you were privy to the inside of certain computing environments in those early
days, like hanging around the PPC (handheld) guys, many of whom were UNIX users,
you could appreciate their interest in FORTH.  For one, handheld languages (Basic
for example on the HP-71) and early PC languages were pretty slow, and FORTH added
a lot of speed, and more access to system internals, which has been supplanted
largely nowadays by 'C'.