[Forth, dt] Hi, can I be a maintainer?

Exercism Building Exercism
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Hi there! I’m an active-when-I-can-be maintainer in some other tracks.

Can I be added as a maintainer for the Forth track?

Also can a track be created for dt? (https://dt.plumbing)

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P.S. I plan to use Gforth (from GNU) as the reference Forth in examples and tests etc, but to keep the track general enough to accommodate any implementation of the ANS Forth standard

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Is Gforth substantially different from 8th?

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ANS Forth (which Gforth implements) is different from 8th. It’s sort of like Common Lisp vs Scheme, or a POSIX shell vs something like Fish or Elvish

Though there is a Forth standard (several, in fact), 8th does not adhere to it in any particulars, choosing instead to be inspired by Forth’s concepts while being more accessible to a wider audience. Most design decisions were made in the interest of keeping applications secure while providing freedom to accomplish normal programming tasks in a cross-platform and reasonable manner.
8th Manual

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I’ve just added you to the Forth team.

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Okay, that does make it sound like they’re different languages. Do you have some examples that show the difference between the two languages?

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Could you maybe follow the instruction at GitHub - exercism/generic-track?

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I haven’t used 8th personally, but from what I can tell the differences are pretty fundamental.

  • Forth has no concept of types, 8th is strongly typed
  • Forth has simple contiguous blocks of memory and manual memory management, 8th has growable strings/arrays/etc
  • Forth is minimal, 8th is more batteries-included

As a comparison, Forth is more like C, and 8th is more like C++ bundled with Boost.

There are also some non-technical differences:

  • There are many Forth implementations and most are open source, just like there are many open source C compilers. Just like C or AWK or EcmaScript or Scheme, the language is more of a spec than an implementation.
  • 8th is a closed source commercial product 8th - One Effort, Multiple Platforms
  • There is a little rocky history (example) between the Forth community and the 8th dev. I don’t have a dog in the fight… 8th looks impressive, and I can admire the creator’s ambition, but I have reasons for preferring open source software.
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Okay, that makes it sound like they’re different enough to warrant different tracks!

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