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I liked Forth a lot, but then I grew up on assembly language. The whole TIL (threaded interpreted language) scheme is extremely simple and is easily ported to different processors. One of the main problems with Forth is that the programmer is assumed to be an expert. There's pretty much no hand holding.
Forth Inc. is still in business too (www.forth.com).
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I didn't care for Forth. I didn't grasp it immediately and it was always a struggle for me to deal with.
The same applies to RPN for me. I think I was the only one in my engineering school who didn't have an HP calculator. Coincidentally, I went to school in the same town where HP designed and built them at the time.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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I like it because of it's interactive nature. Write a 'word' and you can test it immediately. Made for much quicker development at the time. Also, it was relatively easy to make a multitasking Forth (round robin scheduling).
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Take a look at the PostScript manual. As far as I can see its FORTH with extra graphics bits.
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I knew it is a stack oriented language, but never looked at it's keywords. I took a quick gander and it does look very forth like.
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Algol58 / 60 / 68 had an assignment operator which was (in the spec) a left facing arrow, but usually represent as := in implementations. We referred to it as the 'becomes' operator. The '=' was an equality operator. I do not know why K&R etc decided to use '=' as an assignment operator in C (a source of errors ever since, even in Yoda mode) even though C is ultimately derived from Algol; unless they wanted compatibility with FORTRAN (which uses .EQ. as its equality operator, so no ambiguity).
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For the new language, I am thinking from programmers' perspective.
The Reverse Polish Notation is good for computer but confusing for humans.
Writing a + 12 = x and finding where the var is set - is looking confusing but we may find some solution(s), I haven't yet thought much about it yet. We may also find some unique way of defining variables which is not used in any programming language yet.
The new proper LtR programming language idea came to mind to reduce code, faster parsing/compiling/execution, less code traversal. We may get used to the syntax if we practice more.
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NeverJustHere wrote: I've written software using genuine alpha and beta glyphs
Heaven help you if you ever look at the source code on a machine where the system locale is not set to English. I had a case the other day where a Greek mu (µ) character in the UI was showing up as a kanji character.
English version of Windows, check.
User language set to English, check.
English keyboard selected, check.
...
Wait a second. Who set the bloody-be-damned system locale to Simplified Chinese? At some point the box had been restored to the original image, and this was during a brief period when our out-sourced assembly folks were setting all of our boxes to Simplified Chinese. Grrr... 
Software Zen: delete this;
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Quote: there is already a better language for this representation, reverse polish notation. (a 12 +)
You were so close! Use prefix notation instead
(+ a 12) and then you already have a powerful language with modern language features.
Postfix notation
(a 12 +) gives you Forth, with little expressive power.
Prefix notation
(+ a 12) gives you Lisp, with all currently known language features.
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In Arabic the numbers are written left to right.
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I am not sure but the direction could have changed in last 100-400 years because of the influence of the western culture.
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With the "programming" aspect of your post aside...
Nikunj_Bhatt wrote: decimal numbers are Arabic numeral
I'm confused... what does this mean? How is a number (decimal or otherwise) specifically Arabic? (and therefore specifically RtL)
Nikunj_Bhatt wrote: Maths, the number language, is actually written RtL
What do you mean by this? If I write a sum on a piece of paper, I would write:
1 + 2 = 3
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The numbers that we are using is the decimal numbers a.k.a. Arabic numerals. Here is the history of the numbers: Arabic numerals - Wikipedia[^]. The decimal numbers are called Arabic numbers because they were invented by Arabs (however Zero was invented in India, it is also part of Arabic numbers).
So,
1 + 2 = 3 is a correct way in LtR while
3 = 1 + 2 is correct way according to RtL (Arabic, Hebew, etc. RtL languages, however this is now not used because of international Mathematics influence.)
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Just because they may have originated in another language does not mean they are still that language. It depends on the context used. Otherwise you could easily argue a lot of English is not actually English because it originated in another language... it doesn't matter where it came from it's only how it's used that matters.
If your argument is that Maths is it's own language, then it can also defined it's own read order (i.e. LtR), it doesn't matter where the numbers original came from and how they were originally read.
My point is, there is no reason to why they have to be read RtL just because they are decimal numbers.
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musefan wrote: If your argument is that Maths is it's own language, then it can also defined it's own read order (i.e. LtR), it doesn't matter where the numbers original came from and how they were originally read.
My concern is about programming, not about Maths. So, Maths can have its own read-write direction but in programming we can define what is logical - because programming is all about logic, isn't it?
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musefan wrote: I'm confused... what does this mean? How is a number (decimal or otherwise) specifically Arabic? (and therefore specifically RtL)
Our numbering system (and the number 0) are arabic inventions. Romans use a different system, and do not have a sign for nothing.
Doesn't make the number itself an Arabic thing, only our current defacto way of encoding these.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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It is interesting to notice that numbers are written the same way in LtR and RtL languages, with the most significant digit to the left.
Also notice that in a number of languages, including old English, it was common to read (and write as words) e.g. four-and-twenty, as if read RtL, rather than twentyfour. In German, you still read numbers RtL, at least up to one hundred. Norwegian was similar until a reform in the 1950s.
(If you try to bake twentyfour blackbirds in a pie, the rythm will be screwed up...)
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Oh I get that, my confusion is how does that decide how we should use the symbols. Maths is the language, and Maths decides how the language should be read. Not the language where some of the symbols originated.
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We had maths before we had symbols for numbers. Then, we found that the Roman system has its limitations in doing math. So we switched.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I spent a few years programming in Planc - Programming LAnguage for Norsk data Computers. Fairly Pascal-like (plus a number of system programming features), but assignments were LtR, like: I + J =: K;
(It also had the very useful swap assignment - if you wrote: newI =: I =: oldI; the newI would be assigned to both I and oldI, but if you rather used newI :=: I =: oldI; the assignment to I would carry the old value of I over to following assignment. So A :=: B =: A; is a full swap.)
You could say that APL is strictly RtL: it has no operator priorities; you have to control all out-of-sequential-order calculations with parentheses. There are two ways to conceptualize this: If you like to work bottom-up, collect the small pieces into larger structures, finally being assigned to a variable, then you start at the right end and read to the left. The alternative is to do it top down, reading from left to right. All the special APL characters makes it difficult to give a true example, but to write it in a Pascal-like way:
TotalCost := FixedCost + UnitCost * Amount1 + Amount2;
TotalCost is assigned a new value, that's the top level. The value is a sum of a FixedCost and something else, what ever the details of the "something else" is. If you want those details, you read on to see a UnitCost multiplied by something, presumably a number of units. To see the details of how the number of units are calculated, you read to see that two amounts are added. The more details you want, the further you read.
If you turn it the other way around, in a LtR language
(Amount2 + Amount1) * UnitCost + FixedCost =: TotalCost;
you start with two out-of-context amounts added together, but you really don't know for which purpose. You multiply it by a value, but there is still no indication of why. You add a FixedCost, but only at the very end of the statement do you realize what you are doing all this for!
Top-Down design has been accepted in systems design, and even in code design, since the 1970s, but when we get down to real programming, we still insist on assembling small pieces without knowing the purpose of it. 
I liked the Planc LtR style. But I also like the APL top-down-approach when reading it LtR. I agree that the current mainstream languages makes your attention jump back and forth; I would rather have the APL or Planc philosophy.
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Member 7989122 wrote:
Top-Down design has been accepted in systems design
Did that happen on the same day a single religion has been accepted, a single government form has been decided and a single indentation pattern was agreed upon for the whole world?
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
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Maybe I should have been more precise: It is accepted as one of several options in systems design.
Not everyone is following the "agile" apporach to extremes, the one where you do, like: "Oh, so you have a problem? Let's start with 'int main(int argc, char** argv) { return 0;}'. There! Now we are going at it. So what is your problem?"
I know that "waterfall" is one of the baddest swear words you can use in today's software development world. But when you go through our company's process description from a customer requirement spec to the product delivery, it looks awfully close to a waterfall. Each individual step is managed according to agile principles (this is stressed a lot internally), and if I had made even slight side remarks about the process having strong resemblande to the waterfall model, I would have been fired the same day. So I don't.
I believe this is far more common than up-to-date programmers want to know of. They want to enforce a pure agile strategy at their step of the waterfall, believing that that is everything there is. But in a large, established product oriented company that still maintenance on products developed ten years ago, and considers what the market will want five years into the future, you very easily end up with something very much like a waterfall. We just call it by different names, and avoid the swear words.
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Sure, do it. By the way TI-BASIC has an -> operator for assignment, of course working left to right. And Smalltalk has left-to-right evaluation of operations instead of relying on operator precedence (which is initially confusing, but you don't have to remember the relative precedences of uncommon combinations of operators).
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Nikunj_Bhatt wrote: So, what are your views on creating a new programming language which follows proper LtR execution?
What "problem" would that solve?
Yeah, I didn't think so. There's plenty of languages to know already, I don't think anybody wants another one that only "fixes" this.
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It may not solve any problem. I presented my thought from logical view as programming is all about logic. I have already wrote that I know that there are already plenty of programming languages; I am not actually going to create any language.
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