Whenever you consider a programming language, you most likely consider a hefty compiler or interpreter. Perhaps its on a bunch of floppies, a CD, and even an EEPROM. However what a few language that matches in a single disk sector? A language like that may — in principle — be used to assist bootstrap a pc system and that was the concept behind Sector Forth and, later, Sector Lisp. Nonetheless, there’s a brand new sport on the town: milliForth, which claims to be the smallest ever at 422 380 bytes.

Why would you need such a factor? Properly, to start with, why not? At the same time as a type of code golf, packing a functioning language right into a tiny house appears attention-grabbing. Nonetheless, you may additionally presumably use one thing like this in addition a small system or on a system with restricted storage.

As you may count on, there are compromises. There are only some key phrases however since Forth can outline new phrases, which may not be an issue The enter system is a bit of completely different than you may count on, however you might be unlikely to need to use this as an interactive interpreter, anyway.

After all, this means a problem: Are you able to write extra with much less? If you wish to attempt, there’s no want to truly boot a system. Virtualization software program makes it straightforward to spin up a digital machine to attempt issues like this out.

SectorLisp is a bit of bigger, however not a lot. Forth is a good candidate for placing on small computer systems.