What are some real-world projects done in concatenative languages like Forth, Factor, Joy, etc.?
+7
A:
PostScript is concatenative, and there's obviously a huge number of applications of PostScript. It's just not a general purpose programming language.
Greg Hewgill
2009-11-18 10:02:42
+5
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factorcode.org, concatenative.org and tinyvid.tv are powered by Furnace, a Factor web server and framework.
John
2009-11-18 10:11:28
+4
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There is the somewhat-obsolete but very cool Quartus Forth for Palm which allowed full compiled application development on the Palm device (Forth as a minimalist language works rather well in those circumstances). Their home page lists several Palm apps.
This FIG page has a list of mostly-embedded projects including a reference to the very cool use of Forth by NASA.
I met a guy at an Apple conference in Queensland back in about 1991 who had retailed a road planning application written in MacForth.
Christopher Diggins was talking about his Cat language being used inside Microsoft to help optimise compilers but I don't know if that went anywhere.
I suspect PowerMOPS (the successor to Neon) may elude the definition of concatenative because its big deal is adding object-orientation, which implies instances.
Andy Dent
2009-11-19 02:31:35
+2
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Take a look at FORTH Inc, They list several projects that they and their customers did, using their FORTH.
John R. Strohm
2009-12-13 04:39:01
+2
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Part of the firmware on Macs (at least in the older PowerPC models) was written in Forth.
See: http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/arch%5Fboot.html
Dana
2009-12-13 04:43:14
+1
A:
As Greg wrote, postscript is the mammoth example.
Concatenative languages pop up everywhere, quite naturally, because of the trivial nature of the language runtime. It's a favourite for many firmwares: I first encountered Forth "in the flesh" in the bootloader for a Sun Sparcstation. It powers the firmware for the OLPC.
Ocaml's parent, Caml was based on realising the semantics of functional programming as the Categorical Abstract Machine (the CAM in Caml).
Bibtex uses a concatenative language to compile style files.
Charles Stewart
2009-12-22 21:16:51
How is CAM connected with concatenative languages?
ygrek
2009-12-29 08:26:45
Take a look at http://ropas.snu.ac.kr/~pronto/seminar/20061027.pdf It's not quite trivial to realise the combinators of the CAM as a Forth dictionary, but I think it is doable, and certainly the spirit of the operational semantics is concatenative.
Charles Stewart
2009-12-29 16:30:08