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throwaway81523 a day ago

Article is lame in multiple ways, and also eForth was written by Bill Muench. Dr Ting adopted Muench's version to use assembly language bootstrapping instead of metacompilation. Bootstrapping is possibly easier for beginners to understand, but metacompilation is part of Forth's fiendish cleverness and it's a shame for an aficionado to miss out on it.

fallat 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh, I'll have to correct this! I've only seen eForth mentioned with Dr Ting's name all over. Thank you.

The metacompilation part is really nice. Did the self-modification section of the essay not convey that to you? Because that's what it was :s I'll have to revise it.

I really want this essay to be definitive, so even after 4 revisions there is still some way to go. All the comments have been extremely helpful to further reach that goal :)

throwaway81523 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You should also look at how cmForth's metacompilation worked. It's even more fiendish, but relied on cmForth's separate interpreter and compiler dictionaries, which apparently was annoying to use. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/382125.382916

I didn't notice anything in the article that made me think of metacompilation, but maybe I missed it and should re-read.

Added: you should also look at Bill Muench's version of eForth including its metacompiler. I'm not that big a fan of eForth for practical use (it's TOO minimal) but wow it is simple.

kragen 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Dr. Ting did a lot of wonderful expository writing about different Forths, including eForth, but yes, the eForth Model is by Bill Muench.