Going Forth Into the Past
You want to find a higher level language that’s really easy to port to various architectures spanning about 50 years? Brian Stuart has you covered with the classic language Forth. Brian even implemented it himself for his LSI-11 (basically a PDP-11/03 on a chip) back when he was in college, and decided to dust it off for the first time in decades just for VCF East. He also had a 6809 based SBC, a SPARC Station, and the Pocket Chip arm based machine. You name it, Forth will be there. He even was emulating a Tektronix graphics terminal on his laptop, drawing spirograph-like images using Forth -- he later got to test it on the real thing.
“In the late 1960s Charles Moore developed the Forth programming language as a tool for efficiently developing control systems. Ever since, it’s found application in domains ranging from tiny embedded systems, to monitoring sorting belts at FedEx, to implementing workstation consoles, to controlling large telescopes, to controlling large laser arrays doing fusion research. Like LISP before it, Forth developed an avid following of programmers who understood how to use it as a meta-language for creating application specific languages customized to the problem at hand. It has a direct connection to the theory of Turing completeness and is one of the simplest languages to implement. This exhibit celebrates this amazing language by demonstrating several different implementations of Forth on a variety of hardware, all accompanied by educational material to help the viewer understand that concepts behind the language.”