Some Forth Implementations

To finish up one of the geekiest weekends in the last months, I just wanted to point to a few Forth implementations, from where I learned some nice tricks (from both forth and the implementation languages)

- Bashforth/Perlforth
- Rubyforth
- Miniforth
- ItsyForth

I spent a lot of time grasping Bashforth, with its usage of some smart tricks that you don't usually see in bash scripts. Also, the fact that array indices are used as a sort of pointers makes total sense, but it wasn't obvious to me at first (I had to research a bit about "delcare"). Perlforth is done by the same guy, so it uses a similar approach.

Miniforth is Lua, and uses a different kind of implementation, and gets to bootstrap something forthish in 40 lines of lua.  Not bad :)

Rubyforth is the one I touched less, but looks like a variation of miniforth with more Forth compliance.

Now a quick bash quiz: What does it echo? AnswerHere

#!/bin/bash
fun() {
        local var="local value of var"
        echo "$ref";
}
var="global var"
declare -n ref=var
fun 

Well, there are two more canonical forth implementations that is worth mentioning them here, because if you're gonna just look at one implementation, you should take these ones as more "de facto" implementations.
- pforth
- jonesforth