Bernd Paysan

There have been CPUs with multiple datastacks e.g. https://bernd-paysan.de/4stack.html is a VLIW ISA with a very dense encoding and "just less ports" to the register file than a classic DSP.

With great respect to Doug McIlroy (in the CACM article), the shell pipeline has a serious problem that Knuth's Pascal program doesn't have. (I'm assuming Knuth's program is written in standard Pascal.) You could have compiled and run Knuth's program on an IBM PC XT running MS-DOS; indeed on any computer having a standard Pascal compiler. Not so the shell pipeline, where you must be running under an operating system with pipes and 4 additional programs: tr, sort, uniq, and sed. McIlroy also discusses how a program "built for the ages" should have "a large factor of safety". McIlroy was worried about how Knuth's program would scale up to larger bodies of text. Also, Bentley's/McIlroy's critique was published in 1986, which I think was well before there was a major look into Unix tools and their susceptibility to buffer overruns, etc. In 1986, could people have determined the limits of tr, sort, uniq, sed, and pipes--both individually and collectively--when handling large bodies of text? With a lot of effort, yes, but if there was a problem, Knuth at least only had one program to look at. With the shell pipeline, one would have to examine the 4 programs plus the shell's implementation of pipes. (I'm not defending Pascal and Knuth, Bentley, and McIlroy are always worth reading on any topic -- thanks for posting the link!) Bringing this back to Forth, Bernd Paysan, who needs no introduction to the people in the Forth community, wrote "A Web-Server in Forth",…

Look at for example the GA144 and similar tiny deeply embedded cores like http://bernd-paysan.de/b16.html , where the stack is implemented as a register file. Those cores are actually fast, but limited in capability and a nuisance to program.

25 years old, but http://bernd-paysan.de/4stack.html sounded interesting at the time.

Another microprocessor able to execute Forth natively is the b16, from one of the original authors of Gforth. http://bernd-paysan.de/b16.html

This is a nice, concise overview: http://cs.earlham.edu/~stoneda/cs71/ Why Forth: http://bernd-paysan.de/why-forth.html

These projects seem really cool! A few links and historical references that might be of interest: > On the hardware side I want to use small and simple systems If you'd like to build a fully understandable computer, you might be interested in concatenative languages like Forth, Factor, and colorForth. These use a much simpler and more understandable, typically stack-based computational model that run on microcontrollers like STM32. You can create more complex words by composing together simple assembly-language-like atoms and building higher and higher layers of abstraction. - https://factorcode.org/ - https://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Factor/FAQ/Why%3F - Motivation section from: https://bernd-paysan.de/why-forth.html > On the software side I have a simple GUI and macro language that is easy to learn and much much simpler and more elegant than current conventional UIs. A good starting point or source of inspiration might be the Smalltalk and Lisp Machines from the past. - Introduction to the Smalltalk Programming Language: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1241904/Introduction-to-the-Small… - How Do I Master The Art of Smalltalk? https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-master-the-art-of-Smalltalk?share - Live Objects in Smalltalk Pharo: https://www.quora.com/What-is-this-live-objects-in-Smalltalk-Ive-gotte… - Smalltalk Principles:…