# Re: [stack] Age of Forth, was re: dc etc.

## William Tanksley, Jr — 2006-12-14 16:36:11

    Peter Lawrence <peterl@...> wrote:

     > [Billy said:]

    > > The first Forth was written in 1958 (by Chuck Moore). dc was written

    > > in the B language on a PDP-7, so it couldn't have been written before

    > > the late 1960s. So Forth is still older.

    > Forth goes back to the late '60s, actually. PML.

     It does, and then back to 1958. :-) But although '58 is the origin of

    the language, at the time it wasn't concatenative, and doesn't seem to

    have become concatenative until '64 at the earliest. (At that time it

    was an application called CURVE.)

    This history is taken from

    http://www.forth.com/resources/evolution/evolve_1.html and

    http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL.html (the latter link was my original

    source, which mislead me into believing that the '58 version was

    concatenative -- my error, not its).

    The language named FORTH wasn't built until '68, but given that the

    discussion was of the "grandfather of concatenative languages", I

    think we have to look at ancestry, not nomenclature.

    (Again, I don't think the term "grandfather" is useful -- Forth is in

    no way related to Joy or bc, and Adobe claims that it isn't related to

    Postscript either.)

    Hmm. I just found this link

    http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/psgenesis.html while searching for

    info on the history of PS. Very interesting reading, which points out

    to me that the "true grandfather" of concatenative languages isn't a

    language at all, but rather is the Lukasiewicz notation. That was

    developed in the 1920s -- got anything earlier ;-)? (I was going to

    cite HP RPN, developed ca. 1972, but that's not a universal ancestor

    either, and isn't a programming language either.) Both Forth and bc

    share conceptual ancestry in RPN, and I don't see how they could share

    it anywhere else.

    ANYHOW... I hope the theorizing we're doing will improve people's

    ability to use languages. Actually, I think it has -- Factor is

    solidly established as a productive system (I don't mean to have this

    group take credit for Slava's work, but I'd like to think that Slava's

    knowing about concatenative languages in general has inspired some of

    Factor). Not to slight many of the impressive experiments that have

    emerged -- Cat, to name one, is very cool and should be useful.

    -Billy