Post

That's the bumper sticker I remember from the 1980s

So say we all

I always remember Chuck Moore (Mr. Forth) writing a Battle of Midway simulation in Forth that ran in 8k bytes of RAM. It drove a raster display. The little ships even had country flags! Amazing.

This. I'm an assembly coder and am familiar with this order of operations, but I've never even heard of Forth and had no idea this was called a reverse polish notation. Then again I suppose this has to do with countries too, I don't think that phrase was ever in use in our school system.

its selling point was that - making a minimal implementation for a new architecture is relatively simple - it can be relatively efficient (worse than C but better than BASICs of the era) by using "threaded code" - the language is extendable by design - it has built-in REPL & JIT for interactive use

"But Forth generalizes it (at the cost of inefficient registers use)" This is at least one reason why RCA 1802 + Forth are a great match. The scratchpad registers make it a lot easier.

Thank you! An extra step is sometimes needed to enjoy a comic written by a polymath =)

I once had a button made that said "Forth Go Conquer &!"

Haha I was also going down the path of ❤️ meaning “<3”. Like poetry or any writing, the reader extracts many meanings. 🤪

Firth?

Do you have a postscript for that?

You missed a bit

More precisely Forth is a stack based language. So that sticker pushes l on the stack, then pushes Forth on the stack, then uses the heart operator on those two stack entries. It looks weird and backwards to humans, but that style of programming is extremely resource efficient on the computer.

THANK YOU! I am not very techy, and I stared at that cartoon for several minutes on Monday trying to figure it out before giving up. (I didn't even know how to Google what it could possibly mean.)

Yoda master mystery uncovered is. Programmer Forth ancient he is!

This makes me angry... I remember having to learn polish notation in school for comp sci, and have never used it since... >_<

Postscript my beloved.

That reminds me: I need to look up my HP72 calculator and use it again, it deserves it. 🙂

Only for someone who doesn't know Forth. Ehhh... OK, point taken.

I HP35S ❤️

One of my ATFs now. I wonder if more people are discovering DuskOS?

This is reminiscent of “Alba Mo ❤️”, the Gaelic version of “I ❤️ Scotland”. A better translation is “Scotland my desire”.

I love: #Smalltalk.

Less about speed than memory. That’s why PostScript was RPN. It provided programmability without exploding the memory requirements (it still needed more RAM than, e.g. pcl but that was because the whole page had to be imaged before printing).

You never hand-wrote PostScript? You missed out on so much fun.

The pfp beard checks out 👍

When learning programming I was in awe of this language. I loved the Hewlett-Packard calculators and needed to learn Forth. Unfortunately I couldn’t use it anywhere

#OneForTheTeenagers

It's not Youda-speak, it is Reverse polish notation. It reorders "Operand1 Operator Operand2" into "Operand1 Operand2 Operator". For example 2+3 in RPN becomes 2 3 + And for the joke if "6 7 8" is considered written in RPN, then 8 us the operator and 7 was eaten by 6.

Let me just work this out on my computer

DUP

I was thinking I FORTH GO. (And then something about Rust in the title text.)

If honk then!

I can’t believe I had to wait thirty years for this joke.

SOV

My real one is on the fritz. I have a SwissMicro clone which is not the same, but ok.

And PostScript

By me Japanese is loved.

(valid? (❤️ self lisp))

I was actually paid to deploy a Forth solution. There must be tens of us.

Also Forth

EMIT

I Forth ❤️ true xor Once things get complicated with a lot of dup swap drop it becomes a pain to read, even if you are used to RPN. Try yourself, e.g. here compilebytes.com/share/1ym6We...

😂🥰

Also, faster computers and compiler optimization have made it pretty much obsolete, IIUC.

That Forth joke comes onto my stack.

My wife asked me if it was funny. I said it was. I asked her if she wanted me to explain it. She said no, it's good enough that you tell me it's funny.

Huh, as I was rummaging around, I saw that Forth, Inc. is still in business (selling Forth compilers for $3K USD for rad-hard applications as an extreme example). But perhaps more interesting is this article suggesting Forth will make a resurgence after the apocalypse. dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

Was it? Huh. New things every day.

Cool! 👍

One of my first languages. Don’t remember how I got it running on my Atari 400 but I did. Never did a whole lot with it, but it was fun.

don't blow your stack. 🤪🤣😜😙

Bollocks!

You had to ruin it!

Title text: "I NOTATION POLISH REVERSE ❤️" Alt text: https://explainxkcd.com/3277#Transcript