Martin DeMello wrote:
> On Jan 1, 2008 11:59 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb / cesmail.net> wrote:
>> 1. Rebol is slow. It was pretty much the slowest thing in the Alioth
>> shootout the last time I ran the analysis.
> 
> This from a rubyist? :)

I guess you haven't seen my RubyConf 2007 paper. Rebol is slower than
Ruby ... a *lot* slower.

>> 2.The problem I have with Factor is that it's so close to Forth that I
>> don't see any advantage in learning it, since I already know (and love)
>> ANS Forth.
> 
> Fair point. Since I don't know any forth dialect, I figured I'd invest
> in one that's being done from scratch (both for the excitement and for
> the fact that it won't have accumulated historical cruft).

Yeah ... I buzzed by the Factor web site again. Slava has attempted to
merge Forth and Lisp concepts into a new language, even though it looks
more like Forth on paper. The one thing that struck me about that
concept is that the "native" programming language of the Hewlett-Packard
HP-28, HP-48 and HP-49 is something called RPL, which stands for Reverse
Polish Lisp.

RPL looks much like Forth, but I think it's a much more elegant language
than Forth. Built in data types, in addition to real and complex
numbers, include strings, algebraic expressions, binary constants,
matrices and "programs". IIRC it is recursive as well; it definitely has
a functionality equivalent to "lambda". But HP has always considered it
a dialect of Lisp, not a dialect of Forth.