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