[TUHS] forth on early unix

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2025 at 10:15 PM Dave Horsfall via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On Sun, 21 Sep 2025, Larry McVoy via TUHS wrote:
>
> > I'm still not a forth fan.  That said, the sun boot proms were in forth
> > and there was some pretty cool forth in there.  It knew the VM
> > structures, it knew sockets, it knew a lot.  I'm still not a forth fan
> > but it was useful.
>
> The FreeBSD boot scripts are written in FORTH (for the early stages at
> least).
>

The final loader was written in 4th (it's still in the tree) and handled
the scripting around booting...  We added lua several years ago and are
phasing 4th out (14 was going to be the last release with it, but it lives
on in 15 since lua uses more stack than 4th and some combos of options are
too large on BIOS systems with a ~550k limit)

Warner


> Cute language, but then again I was also brought up on APL\360 :-)
>
> -- Dave
>