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by DuncanMak 1290 days ago
Kragen, how much of what you said here about Forth also applies to PostScript, do you think?

I have been tinkering with PostScript but not Forth, I grok that PostScript is a lot closer to LISP. A lot of people (without actually learning these languages/systems) say Forth and PS are similar, but I know that's not really the case - their resemblance is fairly superficial.

1 comments

i agree, and though it is certainly possible to get ensnared in dup exch baling wire in ps, it isn't nearly as common, maybe because you can just 6 dict begin for some tasty recursion-safe local variables when you have the appetite

or maybe because you can't >r r@ r@ rdrop, or because garbage-collected [arrays] remove the temptation to write subroutines with 6 parameters

ps is fairly big compared to forth, not the 16 megs of libgs.so.9.50 but definitely a lot more than 8k

what they have in common is interactive repl orientation, user-defined control structures, great flexibility, lack of static types, and of course rpn

i was going to say 'closures' but of course ps's scoping is dynamic so it lacks them