Post

Jay Morreale
@0brane.bsky.social

In college had the bumper sticker: Forth Love If Honk Then. On two occasions at stop lights, the driver of the car behind me knocked on my window to ask what it meant.

1 repost3 likes

Night of the living D. A. Hosek
@dahosek.bsky.social

I never did forth, but I used to write raw PostScript back in the day and its if syntax was rather different (it would have been Forth Love {honk} {} ifelse). I was surprised to discover that the forth if syntax was rather different with the conditionally executed code after the if.

Peter Flynn
@docum3nt.bsky.social

Mercifully I have only ever needed to use human-oriented languages which do IF cond true false ENDIF (in a variety of syntaxes). But I've never needed to shave 0.000042 picoseconds off the parse phase of a compiler.

Night of the living D. A. Hosek
@dahosek.bsky.social

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).