Hey, thats really cool.
I have been trying to do this for years, but have failed constantly. First I tried gforth directly, but I had to change the sources to offer a clean embedding API, which was ugly. Then I used the atlast framework, which worked nicely but it was too slow ... The I got addicted to performance improvements ... And I probably never got the hang of forth after all :)
Anyhow, great that there is a small and native solution now.
Guenter
On Mon, 17 May 2004, Tom Schouten wrote:
hi all,
i have to confess..
i sort of got stuck in a loop sounding like 'rewrite pdp.. rewrite pdp..' this has been going on for months and while my shrink says it's bound to be transient i think there's something wrong. i suspect i have a meme infection going by the name of 'forth'.
so..
for all of you die-hards, and the curious soul interested in a voyage to the land of conciseness, i present 'mole', the one and only forth for pd.
grab it at http://zwizwa.fartit.com/pd/mole/
tom
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as im totally ignorant about forth, it means little to me, but judging from everyones tone this is something quite cool, so my interest is piqued. anyone care to explain *why*? :) is this just a cool language that can now be embeded into pd patches?
On Mon, 17 May 2004, Josh Steiner wrote:
as im totally ignorant about forth, it means little to me, but judging from everyones tone this is something quite cool, so my interest is piqued. anyone care to explain *why*? :)
without digressing into evangelism (google for forth and you will see), forth is an 'extensible programming language'. you could call it a low-level lisp, but it takes a very different approach.
a good thing about forth is that it enables you to do extreme code factoring, to a point where most functions can be reduced to one line of code.
this is also the bad thing about forth. if you don't factor, it becomes quite impossible to write, and even more impossible to read.
for me, it is the ideal language to write 'throwaway media glue', i.e. single-purpose pd controller objects which are hard to express in pd itself.
another thing is that data-flow and forth seem to match surprizingly well.
pdp is based on a similar language, and i've found it to be ideal for this purpose. (this single-purpose approach resembles embedded systems, where forth is still used a lot supposedly).
there was a slashdot interview with Charles Moore, the inventor of forth, a while ago
http://slashdot.org/interviews/01/09/11/139249.shtml
for more info, have a look at
http://www.ultratechnology.com/
and if you really have too much time on your hands:
now, take all this with a grain of salt. it seems there are only two attitudes towards forth: either you like it a lot, or you hate it.
tom
Le 17 Mai 2004 14:38, Tom Schouten a écrit :
it seems there are only two attitudes towards forth: either you like it a lot, or you hate it.
I liked it quite a lot. I used HMSL before Max and PD (14 years ago): http://www.softsynth.com/hmsl/ It even showed me the basics of object oriented programming. :)
Hallo, Josh Steiner hat gesagt: // Josh Steiner wrote:
as im totally ignorant about forth, it means little to me, but judging from everyones tone this is something quite cool, so my interest is piqued. anyone care to explain *why*? :) is this just a cool language that can now be embeded into pd patches?
I should answer as I also didn't know Forth until this morning. I had read a bit about it here and there, though. It looks like a very simple language according to what I read so far, which is some tutorial info linked from http://www.forth.org and the gforth tutorial. Feels like a mix of assembler, old calculators and Lisp without parens. Simple, clear and consise, like Go.
With mole, it is a language that can be embeded into pd patches. It even is a kind of compiler embeded in Pd.
Ciao
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__
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Frank Barknecht -
guenter geiger -
Josh Steiner -
Marc Lavallée -
Tom Schouten