Melding Moore and Iverson : An Open Abstracted APL built in Forth for Intel processors .
The philosophical goal of Charles Moore's FORTH is to define the minimal vocabulary capable of extending itself; Ken Iverson's goal was to define the maximally meaningful notation . The goal of 4th.CoSy is to abstract the structures and syntax of Iverson's APL in modern Forth, free and open down to the Intel ( or future ) primitives, to create a powerful personal computing environment for the everyday business of life.
Those interested in this tutorial should download the current version of 4th.CoSy and have it with them on a laptop. The tutorial will, thru example,
Show Forth's very simple :
- structure : ( dictionary ; dataStack , returnStack ; interpreter )
- syntax : ( read a word ( delimited by whitespace ) , look it up , interpret it )
Show the APL and K informed CoSy structures and vocabulary :
- Everything is either a list ( of pointers ) or something else
- All objects are allocated and reference counted
- A dictionary ( including the root R ) is a list of 2 correlated lists :
- a list of symbols
- a list of their values
- Dictionaries also have a third item : a list of attribute dictionaries for the symbols .
- Indexing is modulo
- Generally verbs work on on lists . Like K , nested lists are reached thru each and flip
- Particular interesting APLish verbs and adverbs
- All objects have a default display , ala K
- Total environment saved in dictionary , ala APL workspace