Implementing a Forth

I think one of the most interesting questions in the Forth universe is how small can its core be? Which is to say, how few words do you need to implement in a host language (or raw machine code, as we’ll see) before you can bootstrap the rest of the language in the Forth itself? Sadly (ha!), you can make a computer with just one instruction: One-instruction set computer (wikipedia.org). (The most popular one I’ve seen is SUBLEQ, which stands for "SUBtract, branch if Less than/EQual to zero". And since there’s only one, you typically omit it and your program is just the operands for the implied instruction. The "language", then, has no operations and feels to me like the computing equivalent of John Cage’s musical stunt 4'33" (wikipedia.org).) So I guess a Forth with one word is all you need. Therefore, it’s not a question of, "How few words would be possible?" but rather, "How few words would be interesting?" The answer will be personal to you. The Forth-eV Wiki’s page on "Minim ... Read full article.