OT: Language for the ages

[John R. Hogerhuis]

On Fri, 2005-10-14 at 14:36 -0400, Roger Merchberger wrote:

> Forth. Runs on everything from a Tandy Model 100/102/200 (Heck, even some 
> word processors!) to new shiznit, extensible, and rather nearly 
> cross-platform. And, it's ontopic.

I agree Forth would be a good choice. Typically the assembly language
portion of the Forth kernel is extremely minimal. So very little code
needs to be changed to port to a new architecture. So you could include
the entire source code and documentation, and simple porting
instructions for the interpreter along with your application. All on the
same floppy disk ;-)

The downside would be ease of integration with other languages and
libraries.

C may be a better choice, and almost certainly is if your application
will have library dependencies. It would be hard to imagine a CPU and/or
OS going into production without a C compiler and bindings being
available for it.

Fortran seems like a poor choice to me, unless you need access to the
excellent scientific programming libraries available for it. In which
case it is probably the default choice. But I imagine a tiny percentage
of programs require that kind of math library support and can get by
with much less.

-- John.