Toadskin Programmer's Reference Manual version 1.0.x

Availability

What is this thing?

Some programming languages are fun and interesting like FALSE and BrainF**k and FeckFeck. Others are powerful and useful like color forth. Some are evil, soul-sapping nightmares like Intercal, Malbolge, COBOL (Sorry, Grace, nothing personal) and XML.

Toadskin is none of the these things. Toadskin is a pretty trivial Turing tarpit that I banged out on my laptop in a hotel room the other night because I was out of coffee, and only incidentally because I wanted an easy language to compile to BrainF**k, the JVM and Parrot. It's interesting to note that False, the precursor to Brainf**k was also a Forth.

Toadskin is a very tiny Forth. Words may be one character in length. Oh. And watch out, the argument stack is a ring buffer, but the function stack isn't. The built-in words are mostly BrainF**k syntax where appropriate.

BF-like
  + increment
  - decrement
  [ Jump past matching ] if zero
  ] Jump to matching [
  . output
  , input

Forth-like 
  : Define word (start definition)
  ; End definition
  > pop argument from stack
  < push argument to stack
  % swap the top 2 entries in the argument stack

A Hello World in Toadskin (by no means the most efficient):

Hello World in Loop-less Toadskin! (The pop at the 
end is just to make the lines even and pretty)

:V+++++;:XVV;:v-----;:xvv;XXXXXXX++.<XXXXXXXXXX+.V
++..+++.<XXX++.>>XV.XX++++.+++.v-.x++.<XXX+++.<X.>

I actually wrote this "hello world" just before adding the [...] construct or the % so look at some of the other toadskin samples for those.

Why?

If you have to ask, then you have never been stuck in a hotel room in Fort Worth with no internet access.

Except where otherwise noted This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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