FORTH and Hypercard

[Stephen Barncard]

In 1980 I worked with Kenny Jones (now at Digital Domain) at a place 
called New World Pictures. We worked on a machine called the Elicon, 
a camera control robot that was programmed in FORTH, and made movie 
special effects for Roger Corman and others.

It was a beautiful piece of work - dc servo motors driven from a huge 
interface panel and a PDP-11.

I liked FORTH a lot. I had an implementation of FORTH for the Apple 
][ that screamed.  UI was a command line.

I also liked a feature of Hypercard that was like forth - you could 
redefine and intercept a lower level handler using the same name. I 
guess it was a design decision to not allow that in Transcript.... 
but why?

sqb


>Mark,
>
>One of the great things about Forth was the overhead of just a few 
>machine language instructions to execute a high level function 
>call.  
>Transcript seems to require a trip around the world to jump next 
>door.  For GUI speed stuff, it would not be a problem, but for my 
>array crunching stuff, I am stuck writing everything in one handler 
>to keep the speed up.  The convenience of having an environment like 
>that would be very tempting to use for whatever could stand the 
>overhead --and that might be quit a lot of applications.
>
>Dennis

-- 
stephen barncard
s a n  f r a n c i s c o
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