[ColorForth] reinventing the internet?

[lysse@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Tom Novelli wrote:
> It's funny you guys are talking about simplifying TCP/IP.. I was just thinking
> the same thing but I kept quiet. Reading the old RFC's I realized things were
> very complicated in the 70's and 80's.. the internet was used to tie together
> all kinds of networks which are gone now, replaced by TCP/IP. I say scrap it.
> Ditch the crappy file formats.. HTML, SGML, PDF, PS.. come up with a simple
> replacement for html, and a simple vector graphics format.

If it's simple, it will also have to be extensible, otherwise it'll end
up being extended into a monstrosity (qv. HTML). It should probably also
be Turing-complete, and easy to parse and compile... sound familiar?

Using Forth as a core language in which to implement communications
protocols is something that's crossed my mind before. Basically, it's
asynchronous RPC; you send some Forth to an interpreter on the other
end, which executes it; as a result of that execution, it might send
some Forth back to you, which you execute; and so on. Forth is dead easy
to generate by machine, and having it in human-readable form gives us
all the advantages of debugging that TCP/IP has traditionally enjoyed.

And of course, the only string processing you need to do is in the
interpreter...

> About my experience with Color Forth: I gave up on "colored" and pre-parsed
> source code.. it's not extendable like traditional Forth.

I thought that, too, until I realised that all the red word does is put
HERE in the dictionary. If you want runtime code, you can define a word
that does POP >A and whatever else needs doing.

Or you can remap the colours on a per-app basis.
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