The Forth programming language, which comes with its own slimline operating environment, has finally won recognition from the US Association for Computing Machinery, which has created SIGForth, the ACM Special Interest Group on Forth – and what’s more, it’s the first new special interest group for seven years. Because major development time and cost savings result from its ability to function both as a prototyping language and an implementation language, Forth is considered a proprietary edge and trade secret by many software industry leaders, says the Association. As a result, many popular commercial products, such as Ashton-Tate’s RapidFile, Paperback Software’s VP-Planner and IBM’s PC-CAD are written in Forth. The Association reckons that it is ideally suited for the RISC environment, so that more RISC processors have been built specifically to run Forth than any other language. As reported over the years in Computergram, Novix Inc of Cupertino, California, Harris Semiconductor in Melbourne, Florida have Forth processors in production, and there is also a tie-up between Silicon Composers in Palo Alto, and Johns Hopkins University on a RISC optimised to run Forth.
