Describes how to program in FORTH, an ideal microcontroller language for instrument control and automation, with emphasis on its basic concepts and syntax.

The elitist view above needs some comments: There have been successful attepts to learn Forth to childrens who have learning difficulties. These childs have shown that they can use Forth. They even use Forth in a professional manner, i.e. they write short words which do one thing right, and without any comments except stack effect and word name. It might take them longer than a Forth professional to find solutions, and they might not find as clever solutions, but they find solutions, and some are quite interesting. This leads to a quite different conclusion:

Forth is just different. Many people who know other languages say that Forth does everything upside down. The childrens mentioned above have difficulties with math - they choose the Forth course only if they are assured that they don’t have to do much math in it. That also means that they probably never were good at infix notation, or that they know that by heart. They also haven’t seen any other programming language. For them, Forth’s way to do things

väga hea sissejuhatus forthi. +lapsed ja forth.

I see your point about “you’re at 2, move 3”, if the mental schema is a number line. But I see 2 green blocks and 3 red blocks. “+” means put them together and count them up. When I multiply, I see identical rows all lined up in columns in my mind’s eye. For that brain, RPN is just as reasonable, if not more so.

I’m not sure that anything about math is natural or innate. But I remember learning order of operations as a child. It was something we had to memorize, rather than something that any of us understood naturally. Are you 100% sure of the precedence order of bit-shift and assignment in C? I use parentheses sometimes where they’re not necessary, just to make the code clear. This is an artifact of the notation.

“Do stuff in left-to-right order” doesn’t require much thought in comparison.

In this article, we’re going to talk about an old but really interesting language, one that’s currently having a little bit of a revival on small embedded hardware like Arduino: Forth! Forth is, as the title of this article implies, almost more of a machine than a language. It’s like a tiny computer with its

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