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Build Your Own Forth Interpreter
This challenge is to build your own Forth-like interpreter. Forth is a stack-oriented programming language that was designed by Charles H. "Chuck" Moore and first used by other programmers in 1970. It gained an official standard in 1994. Although it’s not an acronym, for much of it like Forth was referred to as FORTH. Why Forth and not Fourth? Here’s why:
“The first time I combined the ideas I had been developing into a single entity, I was working on an IBM 1130, a “third-generation” computer. The result seemed so powerful that I considered it a “fourth-generation computer language.” I would have called it FOURTH, except that the 1130 permitted only five-character identifiers. So FOURTH became FORTH, a nicer play on words anyway.”
— Charles H. Moore, creator of Forth
Forth has been used to write bestselling computer games, firmware, spaceflight software and various embedded systems. For us it’s a fun language to implement an interpreter for and it gives you a chance to learn about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), stack oriented-programming and writing interpreters.
This challenge is to build your own Forth-like interpreter. That is an interpreter for a subset of the Forth language, sufficient for you to write and run code to generate the Fibonacci sequence and the coding interview favourite, FizzBuzz.
You can build a Forth-like interpreter in any programming language or stack. You could build it as a CLI tool or as an in-browser interpreter with a web based IDE. So this coding challenge will suit frontend, backend, fullstack, data engineer, system, or whatever type of software engineer you consider yourself to be.
Me, I built it as a CLI tool just like the other compilers and interpreters I’ve built.
As always, in a throwback to the days when I wrote C, Coding Challenges is zero indexed. In this step your goal is to:
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