[Haskell-cafe] G machine in FORTH

[Michael Vanier]

I always thought Forth was way cool, but I've never managed to get anything
significant written in it.  I think that Forth has echoes of the
"point-free" style in Haskell, but Haskell is a lot friendlier.

Is the Forth environment part of the hardware?  If your Forth is just a
threaded interpreter written in software then it seems wasteful to compile
Haskell down to an interpreted environment.  If it's part of the hardware
then I think it would be (at the very least) an interesting exercise.

Mike

> Date: Wed, 1 Jun 2005 17:25:24 -0400
> From: Andrew Harris <andrew.unit at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Andrew Harris <andrew.unit at gmail.com>
> 
> Hi -
> 
>    Brace yourself... I work in an environment where FORTH is still used.
> 
>    I've been thinking about writing a G-machine interpreter in FORTH
> so that one could write Haskell like programs that would compile down
> and run "graph-reduction" style on the FORTH machine.
> 
>    Many developers think FORTH is nice, but the language is so, shall
> we say, "terse".
> 
>    I'm curious about what people think about this; having the
> expressiveness of a Haskell-like language that compiles to this
> environment might provide the best of both worlds, simple hardware
> architecture and an advanced programming language.
> 
> let me know what you think,
> -andrew