Re: Forth-based Unix tools
Penio Penev wrote:
>
> The main problem is the lack of a "common" FORTH environment across
> Unices. FORTH is a great scripting tool, and I see no reason whatsoever,
> aside from the latter, that perl, awk, tcl, sed, and company should exist
> in a form different than FORTH extensions :-)
>
>
> I, myself, would love to see gnuplot in such an environment -- I am fed up
> of its limited graph-description scripts.
>
> Or, how about a FORTH module for Apache :-)
>
> One possibility is to standardize on Linux -- adding Linux on a network is
> cheap enough, so it can be used as a FORTH server in heterogeneous
> environments -- and also, Linux is the platform of choice for Open Source
> (now, how does this sound :-)
>
We've been thinking somewhat along similar lines.
We have a PC-based Forth system that we've used for many years now to
develop educational applications and business presentations. More
recently we've been bringing it into ANS compliance. A year ago or so we
built some fairly extensive Windows extensions onto the system, and were
planning to polish those further.
But lately our market has shifted to the web and we've been thinking...
the hell with Windows. What we really want is a productive Forth system
that likes to work in a web environment, e.g., can talk to the web
server and to SQL databases, and allow us to build neat server-side
applications. At present we're using Cold Fusion... and find it rather
distasteful.
Love to talk with anyone interested in an open software project based on
the years of work we've done that could move these aims along.
Best wishes,
Lloyd R. Prentice
Prentice Associates Incorporated
