Prime and 50g, interesting perspective

[ijabbott]

(09-01-2021 11:08 PM)3298 Wrote:  - Since RPL's ancestor Forth was also mentioned, I'll refer to this hint from Leo Brodie's classical Forth introduction:

Quote:Some elements of good FORTH style include:
- [...]
- the use of many short definitions rather than a few longer ones,

This can be applied directly to RPL. That means producing a flood of smaller programs to solve small parts of your problem, and using them in more programs to solve incrementally larger parts, until you have one that can handle the entire problem. In addition to having the pieces available for use in related problems, you'll also make it easier to understand the whole solution by breaking it down into bite-sized pieces. For instance, if RPL didn't have DOT and CROSS already, you'd implement them first, then use them in a program calculating the Hamilton product.

Good practice, and its why the concatenative programming language 'Factor' gets its name.

However, I understand global symbol look-ups in RPL are rather slow? (No doubt newRPL would speed things up a lot.)