Bootstrapping a Forth in 40 lines of Lua code

I 'learned' Forth decades ago (on a Sinclair ZX81, so essentially a quite horrible experience), and tripped over it again recently.. ending up ploughing through the books "Thinking Forth" and (currently) "Starting Forth" both of which are extremely interesting and so very very different to what we use these days. It very much fits into that saying "A language that doesn't change how your think about programming, isn't worth knowing". I realise now just how shallow an understanding of Forth…

If you want to understand Forth, I recommend this article: A sometimes minimal FORTH compiler and tutorial for Linux / i386 systems by Richard W.M. Jones "LISP is the ultimate high-level language, and features from LISP are being added every decade to the more common languages. But FORTH is in some ways the ultimate in low level programming. Out of the box it lacks features like dynamic memory management and even strings. In fact, at its primitive level it lacks…