Tuesday, October 06, 2020

STOICAL - the journey continues

 As a result of a few recent Forth threads on Hacker News, I first heard of STOIC on September 29th. (1 Week ago) Intrigued at the novel way it addressed the shortcomings of Forth which limited its use... I tracked down STOICAL. It really got me motivated, and I decided to download it and dive in.

At that moment, I had almost zero of the specific bits of knowledge required to make it work. I only used Linux sporadically. I never programmed in Linux. I actively avoided C for the last 40 years. Yet, I dug in.

Last night I got it compiled enough that it now starts up, and then hangs. This is a vast improvement from 2 days ago. I now have WSL installed, with gcc, automake, and all manner of stuff required to make it go. I still use Notepad++ and windows to edit the source (as the /home/mike folder is visible as a network share) I've even got git/github going.

I know I'll get it up and running in short order. Then I'll start banging away at it until it matches my ideas of how it should work. My goal is to produce a Forth-ish compiler that doesn't get people intrigued but then run out of steam.

STOIC checks all the boxes, it's Imperative, Structured, Object Oriented, Functional, Concatenative and HomoIconic.

And right now.... it doesn't even boot... but it will! That's programming!

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