AriCalculator is a home made pocket calculator.

[Jim Horn]

Why FORTH? If his microprocessor (an NXP unit) doesn't have a good C compiler / debugger package available for free and he's adept with FORTH, why not? Porting FORTH to a new CPU architecture is a matter of hours for those who have done it, especially since the vast majority of the language is written in itself. Only a small amount is in assembly. So it's easy to bootstrap a development system very quickly. And with modern versions, they can be quite powerful.

That's why I chose FORTH as the development language for the 65F12 (6502 variant) used for the engine monitor system for the Voyager World Flight - I wanted a higher level language than raw assembly and wanted it to be self hosted so I could debug on the actual unit. In 1985 that left me with only one choice.

Yes, it's an odd language to those new to it. But it has done quite a bit (many of the production programs for a major aerospace imaging company were written in FORTH, not by me but I got to support them).