The reference you gave, Mago and Middleton, The FFP Machine: A Progress Report", is really obscure. Citeseer can find only one reference to it. Can you point to a more widely-known article? Also, a search on Citeseer for the phrase "Formal Functional Programming" turns up nothing. Details, please?
Long ago, as I mentioned in another post, I used Forth to build some signal processing code. In addition to simple syntax and semantics, the remarkable ease of interaction with Forth was a revelation. Only good Lisp programming environments come close -- and they require a lot more code.
The trouble was, I couldn't read my code a month after I wrote it. The screen-based editor just didn't provide the flexibility I needed for documenting what I had done. Has there been work on, say, literate programming for Forth? Or even just a better editor?
Long ago, I used Forth for signal processing work for my master's thesis. The incredibly simple syntax and semantics were (and are) great. Recently, I read a claim that Forth is a functional language, in the same class as Scheme, ML, Haskell and so on. This was a surprising thought, as I had considered Forth as simply the right way to do an assembly language.
So here's my question: has anyone considered adding a modern type system (e.g. Hindley-Milner) to Forth? Other typed assembly (intermediate) languages are appearing -- see http://flint.cs.yale.edu/flint/ for a nice example -- why not Forth?
Static type checking in a mathematically rigorous context is a natural fit to a functional language; IMHO it's a wonderful aid to the programmer, and done right adds almost no overhead.
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The reference you gave, Mago and Middleton, The FFP Machine: A Progress Report", is really obscure. Citeseer can find only one reference to it. Can you point to a more widely-known article? Also, a search on Citeseer for the phrase "Formal Functional Programming" turns up nothing. Details, please?
The trouble was, I couldn't read my code a month after I wrote it. The screen-based editor just didn't provide the flexibility I needed for documenting what I had done. Has there been work on, say, literate programming for Forth? Or even just a better editor?
So here's my question: has anyone considered adding a modern type system (e.g. Hindley-Milner) to Forth? Other typed assembly (intermediate) languages are appearing -- see http://flint.cs.yale.edu/flint/ for a nice example -- why not Forth? Static type checking in a mathematically rigorous context is a natural fit to a functional language; IMHO it's a wonderful aid to the programmer, and done right adds almost no overhead.