🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <41910@skye.dcs.ed.ac.uk> gvw@epcc.ed.ac.uk (Greg Wilson) writes:
>[apologies if this is a re-post --- problems first time around]
>
>Hello.  I am looking for a small language to use and modify for teaching
>purposes.  Features I want include:
>
>* small, simple implementation in C (at most one week for a senior
>  student with a C/Unix background to read and understand source).
>
>* very simple syntax --- preferably only a single syntactic form,
>  like Scheme, Logo, and Forth.
>
>* textual scoping of variables (which (sigh) rules out Logo itself)
>
>* logical, integer, floating-point, and string data types (I'm
>  happy to have single characters treated as 1-length strings)
>
    Your goals are mutually exclusive. You ask for a simple language
and then want to include many complicated features. There are versions
of Forth available in the form of C programs. You can get a good one
by ftp from prep.ai.mit.edu as part of the gnu collection. Look for 
the file called tile.2.1.tar.Z. Since it is written in C and does
not exactly follow usual Forth practices, it is named a "threaded
interpretive language" or TIL.
 
>  I regularly lambast physicists for using "old" languages like Fortran,
>  so I feel I should set a good example for students by using some
>  modern ideas myself)
  As a user of Fortran, I must protest the idea that Fortran is an 
old language. Since structured programming concepts were introduced
into Fortran many years ago, there are no "modern" programming ideas
that are need in Fortran to accomplish its purpose of scientific
and mathematical computation. The mathematical notation used by 
physicists is an old language and they don't have much interest in
changing it. So why should they want to switch from Fortran? Perhaps
if other computing languages included things like exponential operations
( ** ), and complex number arithmetic there would be more reason to use
something besides Fortran.
  The best new idea that physicists (and every other programmer) should
use is extensive commenting so human beings can read source listings.
That would be the greatest advance since digital computers were invented.
   Of course if you want a language that can be modified to include any
new idea that you want to try, Forth is a very good choice. And I've
heard that Lisp and Scheme are good for that too.