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Forth References

I first ran across Forth in the late 1980s. I found the language to be interesting to work with, but I figured no one would pay me to program in it. I went on to learn C and got a professional programming position based on that skill. Four and a half years later, I was hired to work in Forth (among other languages).

Forth is an odd little language that has not caught on in the mainstream. However, Forth does have features worth learning about. The Forth community was familiar with the concept of factoring code way back in 1984. Lately, the OOP community has been using the term refactoring to describe methods of cleaning up code and design. From it's earliest beginnings, Forth had an unusual compiler. It's compiler allowed the use of any run-time behavior of the language at compile time. This allowed for interesting extensions to the language to be written very easily. The C++ community is now using template metaprogramming to implement some of the same ideas.

Forth never really hit the mainstream, but it is still used today. Here are some of the references I've used to help me in my Forth programming.

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