> My point is that Forth's general goal is to be a higher-level assembly language for embedded systems.
This is strictly speaking not true, even though that is a domain where Forth excels. It isn't rare at all to see Forth as the bootstrap language for bringing up new machines or architectures for instance. And I've seen it used for image processing applications, embedded language inside other products and so on. It's definitely not going to be your language of choice for hacking out the next CRUD app, even though there is no technical reason why you couldn't do that.
Just like Lisp is all about transforming arguments, Forth is all about transforming what's on the stack, and to a certain degree the two are equivalent even though their outward form looks at first glance very different. Forth has an easier and cleaner way to add multitasking to the core language than Lisp does (in my opinion, I'm sure others will disagree).
A more modern implementation of the concepts behind Forth can be found in Factor:
Note that Forth (and other stack languages) are an acquired taste, plenty of people don't like them and a good number of those will simply never get beyond the initial turn-off provided by RPN.
This is strictly speaking not true, even though that is a domain where Forth excels. It isn't rare at all to see Forth as the bootstrap language for bringing up new machines or architectures for instance. And I've seen it used for image processing applications, embedded language inside other products and so on. It's definitely not going to be your language of choice for hacking out the next CRUD app, even though there is no technical reason why you couldn't do that.
Just like Lisp is all about transforming arguments, Forth is all about transforming what's on the stack, and to a certain degree the two are equivalent even though their outward form looks at first glance very different. Forth has an easier and cleaner way to add multitasking to the core language than Lisp does (in my opinion, I'm sure others will disagree).
A more modern implementation of the concepts behind Forth can be found in Factor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_(programming_language)
Note that Forth (and other stack languages) are an acquired taste, plenty of people don't like them and a good number of those will simply never get beyond the initial turn-off provided by RPN.