Not entirely sure what you are asking here, but:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-R-G...

It's quite easy to get into and you can expand it and have all sorts of fun with it. Certainly not a revered epitome.

Threaded Interpretive Languages: Their Design and Implementation

https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Desig...

My experience with FORTH was similar, although you've put into words the problems I found with FORTH better than I could.

The original article is by Leo Brodie. I bought his book Starting FORTH (which is now available online[1]) shortly after reading a 1980 Byte Magazine article on FORTH.

It's not hard to implement FORTH. I found that R. G. Loeliger's book[2] Threaded Interpretive Languages: Their Design and Implementation allowed me to easily build my own FORTH inspired system.

[1] https://www.forth.com/starting-forth/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Desig...

You might find R. G. Loeliger's book "Threaded Interpretive Languages: Their Design and Implementation" [1] interesting. Here's a review [2]. The comments on that review list some online resources that might also be useful.

It's long out of print, but used copies are cheap, and scans are readily findable on the net.

I wrote a comment a while back outlining how to do a FORTH-like language from scratch by starting with a simple calculator and expanding it, writing in C with optional assembly optimizations. This was aimed at people who have less knowledge of FORTH-like systems than you do, I think, but if you are curious here it is [3].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Desig...

[2] http://www.retroprogramming.com/2010/03/threaded-interpretiv...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13082825

The wikipedia entry [0] contains some refs. The out-of-print book "Threaded Interpretive Languages" [1] was the definitive treatment of the topic, and what I mostly used back when I was writing Forth compilers.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threaded_code

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Desig...

I cut my teeth using Forth for writing automated tests for storage products (pretty legacy, I'm not sure if the company uses it any more), and got hooked on it afterwards. The test system was based on a custom real time OS, and Forth was a really good fit, but it would be really hard to find developers now that understood how to work with the system. I had also bought Threaded Interperative Languages (https://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Desig...) and chose to roll a Forth interpreter for an 8051 dev board I had laying around, which was pretty fun, and wasn't too difficult. It's mostly just a hobby now, as I don't think there's a lot of companies out there still using Forth.

I think Forth is still useful for embedded systems, often even more so than C, especially given that it can go places that C can't. I would personally choose it for my own embedded projects, but the paradigm is sufficiently different that I would worry about finding other people who have the mental capability to write Forth that doesn't immediately devolve into something unmaintainable, or who even want to learn it in the first place. I still write little scripts with GForth sometimes too, but it's not nearly as productive as just writing some Perl or Python. If you're interested in playing with a slightly more modern concatenative language, Factor is a good choice.

I had a hunch it might be like this. The embedded Java I did on the Dallas part was using fixed sized arrays.

I'd actually love an annotation for Python that ran it under the null-collector. Lots of times in short run or steady state programs one doesn't generate any garbage and the constant GC or ref count over head could done away with.

Did you look @ the Bob language? It was the spiritual seed for Java by David Betz http://www.xlisp.org/

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=dr+dobbs+betz

I really like http://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design...

and

http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/

Forth. Definitely Forth.

Start here:

http://www.amazon.com/Threaded-Interpretive-Languages-Design...