Science & technology

Creation of Forth

1970

Forth is a programming language created by Charles H. Moore, who developed it for controlling telescopes and other equipment, and who later used it at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. It is based on a stack: operands are placed on a stack, and words, which are Forth's functions, take their arguments from it and leave results there. Programmers extend the language by defining new words, which makes it compact and highly adaptable. A Forth system includes an interpreter and compiler in a very small amount of memory, so it was widely used in embedded systems, firmware and spacecraft, and in the Open Firmware boot system. It also influenced later languages such as PostScript.

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