What are the primitive Forth operators?
- by Barry Brown
I'm interested in implementing a Forth system, just so I can get some experience building a simple VM and runtime.
When starting in Forth, one typically learns about the stack and its operators (DROP, DUP, SWAP, etc.) first, so it's natural to think of these as being among the primitive operators. But they're not. Each of them can be broken down into operators that directly manipulate memory and the stack pointers. Later one learns about store (!) and fetch (@) which can be used to implement DUP, SWAP, and so forth (ha!).
So what are the primitive operators? Which ones must be implemented directly in the runtime environment from which all others can be built? I'm not interested in high-performance; I want something that I (and others) can learn from. Operator optimization can come later.
(Yes, I'm aware that I can start with a Turing machine and go from there. That's a bit extreme.)
Edit:
What I'm aiming for is akin to bootstrapping an operating system or a new compiler. What do I need do implement, at minimum, so that I can construct the rest of the system out of those primitive building blocks? I won't implement this on bare hardware; as an educational exercise, I'd write my own minimal VM.
