GoFORTH | A primitive Forth implementation in Go | Interpreter library

GoFORTH is a Go library typically used in Utilities, Interpreter applications. GoFORTH has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

The FORTH language was devised by Charles Moore in the early 1970s for use in embedded applications such as the real-time control of radio telescopes. FORTH is generally considered a Threaded Interpretive Language, meaning that a FORTH program consists of a thread of execution comprising references to words in the dictionary intermingled with values to be stored on the data stack. It is a simple language with an iterative development style which favours rapid interactive development through specification and composition of words. These words differ from functions or procedures in other programming languages by not accepting explicit parameters, instead data is passed implicitly using a data stack and the convention of the language is to place values on this stack in LIFO fashion, favouring a Reverse Polish mathematical style. A FORTH runtime can operate in two distinct modes: interactive and turn-key. An interactive Read-Evaluate-Print loop similar to those found in classic Lisp implementations allows for iterative development with compilation of individual words storing the resulting executable code in a token indexed dictionary. Words can then be interactively tested and their definitions modified until correct. Depending on the richness of the dictionary supplied with the implementation there may also be advanced code editors and other development tools to aid with this process. To create a turnkey executable the dictionary can be stripped of unreferenced tokens and then compiled to a platform-specific binary executable for distribution which contains only the program.