Why, in my day we had to go uphill both ways in the snow to school.

[Leo J Mauler]

On Tue, 09 Dec 2003 07:10:22 -0600 Charles Steinkuehler
<charles at steinkuehler.net> writes:
> Leo J Mauler wrote:
> > On Mon, 08 Dec 2003 09:01:40 -0600 "Brian Kelsay" 
> <BLKELSAY at kcc.usda.gov>
> > writes:
> 
> >> We had Fortran, PL1, Assembler and JCL.
> > 
> > Ahhh, Fortran.  Much more "fun" than BASIC.
> > 
> > Anyone else try to write programs in FORTH?
> 
> I *LOVE* FORTH.  

So did I.  I just couldn't figure out anything I wanted to do with it. 
But I loved FORTH's stack commands.

> I just finished an embedded application written in 
> FORTH (a small temperature/humidity alarm/data-logger
> ...cooperative real-time multitasking running in 8 KBytes 
> of flash and 1K RAM).
> 
> I really want to build a tiny (probably about 10k) FORTH 
> system for linux that has no reliance on libc (making kernel 
> calls directly, instead) and use it to replace a lot of the 
> shell-scripting and busybox tools typically used in small 
> linux systems (like the LEAF firewalls I play with).  Should 
> be a lot of fun.

I had an acquaintance in high school whose dad was a computer science
professor up at the University of Kansas.  Their "home computer" was a
dedicated LISP machine.  Once he complained that he didn't have a
spreadsheet at home to help with his homework.

So his dad wrote a spreadsheet application in LISP.  I still kick myself
for not asking for a copy of the source code.

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