09:00 <proteusguy> lispmacs[work], yeah FlashForth is a great little forth for Atmels which are great little processors (sadly seemingly abandoned now that AtMel was sold).

09:01 <proteusguy> Does guix have anything to do with forth? I don't see anything that suggests this. Just curious.

09:21 <siraben> proteusguy: nope, but it was an avenue used to explore different bootstrapping paths

09:21 <siraben> maybe Forth was just too much to get into, there is a bootstrapped Forth from the seed but it's not able to carry the bootstrap further

09:22 <siraben> OTOH the bootstrapped Lisp has suceeded and the bootstrapped Haskell dialect is promising

09:23 <siraben> GCC 4.7 is the last GCC where a C++ compiler was not a build dependency

09:56 <proteusguy> siraben, yeah generally forths are bootstrapped from asm.... and dealing with Intel CPUs at bootup is rather a nightmare.

09:59 <siraben> proteusguy: maybe they should use my parser generator in Forth! https://github.com/siraben/meta-yacc

10:00 <proteusguy> you should offer.

17:04 <floatcomplex> what purpose does "then" serve in "begin...while...while...repeat then" ? is it just a historical oddity

18:02 <lispmacs[work]> floatcomplex: I'm kind of new to Forth, but is that actually Legal Forth?

18:04 <floatcomplex> lispmacs[work]: idk, i came across it at http://www.forth.org/forth_intro/control.htm

18:06 <lispmacs[work]> I think that is not legal forth, but maybe works because of the way the words put down and pull stuff off the stack

18:06 <lispmacs[work]> `then' is only supposed to be used with `if'

18:06 <lispmacs[work]> off the return stack I mean

18:06 <floatcomplex> yeah and it's just a placeholder that resolves to a nop

18:07 <floatcomplex> so i think if it does the same thing after "repeat" then it can either be there or not, and it merely raises eyebrows

18:09 <lispmacs[work]> floatcomplex: maybe the double use a `while' requires two things available to be popped of the return stack? just a guess

18:09 <lispmacs[work]> i'll try it in gforth without the `then'.

18:10 <floatcomplex> lispmacs[work]: well i understood it to mean "two or more" while statements, without requiring additional then statements

18:11 <lispmacs[work]> floatcomplex: in my testing right now, you must have a matching number of `then' to `while' words or you get error "unstructured"

18:11 <lispmacs[work]> I just tried with three `while's

18:22 <floatcomplex> huh

18:23 <floatcomplex> sounds dirty

18:50 <floatcomplex> yeah i'm definitely not gonna try to support this, it's too weird

18:55 <crc> it's a side effect of how forth control words work

18:56 <crc> some of the words lay down code and leave addresses/data to be patched on the stack by later words

18:56 <crc> it allows for some weird control flow if you like that