HP75C / FORTH / Clock?

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

(03-19-2017 10:00 AM)J-F Garnier Wrote:  

(03-18-2017 04:22 PM)Paul Berger (Canada) Wrote:  I don't understand either of these comments, both C and Forth provide plenty of constructs for for structured programming, however neither one of them forces you to use them.

Just my personal opinion on Forth, and to some extend to other stack-based language like RPL.
By unstructured, I'm not referring to programming structures, but to the difficulty to manage expressions with the variables on the stack (PICK, ROLL, etc, this is the cryptic aspect I was referring to), and the difficulty of using local variables.
[personal opinion again] Stack-based approaches are very efficient for machine internal system - the HP85/75 are good examples - but not friendly for user-level programming language. [/personal opinion]

I know C can be cryptic too, but it's easy to write clean code, and some common expressions that can look as cryptic such as:
checksum += *ptr++;
make immediately sense when you are used to.

Globally, I like better to program in assembly language!

J-F

I think you can write bad code in any language, but yes your point about the stack is in Forth is true, when I have written Forth I always ended up drawing stack diagrams to keep track of what was where on the stack. I really like C it is pretty much my go to language these days, but I have written assembler too, since I am a hardware person assembler is pretty natural to me. In my only short lived professional programming job, we where using a PL/1 like compiler that output assembler that was used to generate the object code. The target system had nothing like a symbolic debugger, so we had to work with the intermediary assembler listing to debug. Many of the computer science grads on our team had a lot of trouble debugging using an assembler listing while I had no trouble at all.