On Fri, 22 Jan 2021 15:24:47 +0000, gareth evans wrote:

> On 22/01/2021 15:19, Tauno Voipio wrote:
>> On 22.1.21 17.03, gareth evans wrote:
>>> On 22/01/2021 13:34, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>> On 22/01/2021 13:22, gareth evans wrote:
>>>>> In my retirement, I have some ideas on language development,
>>>>> essentially interactive as was BASIC and FORTH but running at the
>>>>> speed of compiled code, and the 64 bit ARM instruction set looks
>>>>> like a good starter.
>>>>
>>>> FORTH was good stuff speed wise
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I never used it in anger, but spent a lot of time thinking about it. I
>>> seem to have on my bookshelf most of the FORTH and TIL primers. I was
>>> considering something like a FORTH but not being based upon Reverse
>>> Polish.
>>>
>>> ISTR that FORTH on an RCA 1802 is in the Voyager missions?
>>>
>>> Now, that was a weird instruction set! ISTR 8-off 16 bit registers but
>>> no 16-bit moves, all having to be done in 8-bit chunks through the
>>> accumulator, and no conventional subroutine call but change which of
>>> the 16-bit registers at any time was the program counter!
>>
>>
>> FORTH is as much Reverse Polish (Lukasciewicz) as the older HP
>> calculators.
>>
>>
> You misunderstood my comment.
>
> Let me rephrase ... I was considering a language without using reverse
> polish along the lines of FORTH's interactiveness.

Have you looked at John von Neumanns's interactive JOSS language or its
derivatives JEAN (found on ICL 1900s) and FOCAL (on DEC boxes).

It used real line numbers (so if the needed a line between lines 1.1 and
1.2 you just gave it 1.15 as its line number) and DO PART 3 ran all lines
with with 3 as the integral part of the line number.

It was easy to write and debug but conditionals couldn't have an ELSE
branch  because the condition was the last part of the statement:

2.55 A = B * C + D IF q = "yes"

Speed wasn't bad because I think that, like many basics, the 'run'
command may gave compiled (or at least tokenised) the program before
running it, though I don't remember much gap between startind a run and
getting results. I certainly preferred JEAN to BASIC.



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