@ekaitz_zarraga That's a fair point, figured it might be whataboutism on my part.

@ekaitz_zarraga @aw Yes, I think you're right if we're talking about individual bindings, like I was. But I think eq probably doesn't tell you if two different lists reference shared structure, right? Unless you go through and "eq" each item.

Please tell me if I'm wasting your time btw, happy to go read the fine manual some more.

@aw Good luck to you. I've tried learning Lisp, but I run into practical problems: (1) Full-featured Lisps do not scale down to tiny strange platforms so they don't interest me for hobby projects, (2) Tiny Lisps are missing the features that make Lisp great, like conditions-restarts and proper macros.

And a personal failing: (3) Because Lisp doesn't let you view raw memory addresses, it is very difficult for me to tell whether two bindings are referring to the same item, or to independent copies of the same item that just happen to be equivalent right now.

@d6 @ekaitz_zarraga I agree, it is! It's kind of like "Starting Forth" and "Thinking Forth" in one package. Personally I prefer "Thinking Forth" over "Forth: A Text and Reference", but I could easily understand someone preferring the latter.

I've had lots of thoughts lately about bounded versus unbounded systems.

A book is bounded; the global library system is unbounded. A CD is bounded; Spotify is unbounded. The world is effectively unbounded, and networked computer systems tend to be unbounded too.

Many things are bigger than a human can experience, or changing faster than a human can keep up with. Many curious explorers and tinkerers are drawn to these unbounded things because they are vast, unknowable, and therefore exciting.

But what finite, bounded things are worth exploring and tinkering with?

Just replying to one of my older posts to retract an incorrect statement:

"There is not a large body of material written about #Forth".

I was absolutely incorrect. There is a LOT written down. You just have to dig for it a bit. It's in books and papers, and personal webpages, and places like the #simtel archive. And most of it is pretty old.

I think the other point stands -- Forthlikes have strong structural similarities, and a lot of behavior inevitably falls out of a short set of rules.

Unbounded things can be endlessly novel and fascinating without ever rising to the level of being good or interesting. If you find something unbounded that you like, you can soak in it forever without thinking twice about it.

If you find something bounded that you like, you are stuck. You will eventually run out of new material. Whenever I near the end of a great book or a great album, I have a feeling of doom because I know that soon there will be no more.

Once you finally finish, life gets hard. You want another chapter, or another song, but there's nothing there. You're done.

If you want more, all you can do is try to feed the obsession by replaying the hell out of what you've been given. You need to examine the old material in more and more depth and examine it from every possible angle.

You may even be driven to create something new to feed the hunger inside you.