[jhbadger]

If they allowed FORTH it would be even worse -- everything in FORTH is redefinable -- you could make 1 equal to 2 if you want.

[kronos29296]

Is that why nobody uses it anymore? Only thing I know about it is that it used stack like expressions. (kinda like RPN but for everything)

[milesvp]

My understanding is fourth is still alive and well in the embedded world. A fourth compiler can be written in very few instructions, which is very important when you don't have a lot of memory to work with.

http://demin.ws/blog/english/2012/09/27/fcode/

[Lev1a]

I think nowadays more interpreters/compilers are being written for FORTH than stuff in the language itself.

[kronos29296]

Kinda like BrainF* I see. Turing complete but a readability nightmare. Maybe I should try to write one for FORTH like for BrainF*. Was an interesting exercise especially the loops.

[Jach]

No, the parent is wrong. Maybe on Github Forth interpreters dominate as people's pet projects but there's a good chunk or niche of the embedded industry writing real Forth code every day for new things, not just legacy support. But their code usually isn't on Github. It's a great language for bare metal programming and quite readable, unlike BF which is intentionally unreadable. Forth was designed for low level really (edit: though I remembered there's this if you want an idea of the philosophy http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/), I think it's less suitable for higher level general purpose programming just for its untyped nature alone.

https://www.forth.com/embedded/#Annotated_example_source_cod... contains a version of the canonical washing machine program.

    \ Top-level control
    : WASHER ( -- ) WASH SPIN RINSE SPIN ;

You can then look at the definitions for 'WASH' and 'SPIN' and 'RINSE' and so on until you get down to what IO bits you're turning on or reading when and for how long.

[khedoros1]

I had a friend who was obsessed with Smalltalk in college. He enjoyed showing classmates that you could do things like redefine true and false in the language.

[mpd]

I don't believe there's anything that would prevent that in Ruby, though I'm sure the Forth way would be more elegant.

[pmontra]

Not in the easy way, not with MRI

    $ irb
    2.4.1 :001 > 1.class
     => Integer 
    2.4.1 :002 > class Integer
    2.4.1 :003?>   def 1
    2.4.1 :004?>     2
    2.4.1 :005?>     end
    2.4.1 :006?>   end
    SyntaxError: (irb):3: syntax error, unexpected tINTEGER
    def 1
         ^
    (irb):6: syntax error, unexpected keyword_end, expecting end-of-input

That's not unexpected as small numeric literals are magic in Ruby, for performance reasons.

More evidence:

    2.4.1 :001 > class Integer
    2.4.1 :002?>   define_method(:one) { 1 }
    2.4.1 :003?>   end
     => :one 
    2.4.1 :004 > Integer.one
    NoMethodError: undefined method `one' for Integer:Class
    2.4.1 :005 > Integer.new.one
    NoMethodError: undefined method `new' for Integer:Class
    2.4.1 :006 > Integer.new
    NoMethodError: undefined method `new' for Integer:Class
    2.4.1 :007 > class Klass
    2.4.1 :008?>   define_method(:one) { 1 }
    2.4.1 :009?>   end
     => :one
    2.4.1 :010 > Klass.one
    NoMethodError: undefined method `one' for XY:Class
    2.4.1 :011 > Klass.new.one
     => 1 

So Integer is not like other classes and the actual reason for that http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/post/the_ruby_value_1.html

TLDR MRI gets the value of the number directly from value of the C pointer and saves the lookup. It's a 1 in the lowest bit and the integer value in the others. That's why 0.object_id == 1, 1.object_id == 3, etc

Obviously that's implementation dependent but I guess no Ruby implementation is going us to redefine integers if MRI does not.

[kronos29296]

The other sites don't seem to have this problem as they compare STDOUT. CodeWars should also do something like this.

[ransom1538]

I have begun rewriting all our backend with FORTH.

[mcguire]

So the demo video should be posted next weekend?