[nprescott]

With the veritable flurry of state machine posts today[0,1] I thought I'd (re)submit[2] one of my favorite posts on finite state machines in Forth.

The specific example is of number input routine allows signed decimal numbers without power-of-10 exponents (fixed-point, in FORTRAN parlance) and comes from the author's book Scientific Forth, where a fuller example is used ... to determine whether a piece of text is a proper identifier (that is, the name of a variable, subroutine or function) according to the rules of FORTRAN.

I originally heard of Scientific Forth from Programming in the Twenty First Century where it made a list of "Five Memorable Books about Programming"[3] with the following description:

Dr. Noble demonstrates how he uses Forth for hardcore matrix work and, when he realizes that RPN notation isn't ideal in all circumstances, develops a translator from infix expressions to Forth.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746708

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22748785

[2]: previously 3, 6 and 8 years ago, never any comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3]: https://prog21.dadgum.com/19.html

[nyankosensei]

A project to create a Creative Commons version of Dr. Noble’s book was started, but doesn’t seem very active lately [0]. The lead even received permission from Dr. Noble’s widow [1].

[0] https://github.com/Josefg/Scientific_FORTH [1] https://github.com/Josefg/Scientific_FORTH/blob/master/Conse...

[nprescott]

I've helped out with a few chapters! I'm actually very excited about it due to the relative scarcity of physical copies of the book.

While it isn't too active, the most recent activity was in the last week or so, I think all that remains are some figures and tables for a couple chapters, the index and proof-reading[0]. It's very nearly there due to a lot of work on Josef's part.

[0]: https://github.com/Josefg/Scientific_FORTH/wiki