Small languages (was Re: Lua, Lunatic and Python

[Paul Rubin]

claird at lairds.com (Cameron Laird) writes:
> I think your decision in favor of Lua's a good one.  Guile and
> Scheme, from the last I saw of them, are *not* slender enough to
> compete.  Forth is the one other serious language that can be tiny
> enough to make Lua look stout; while Forth hasn't made a good
> impression on me as a "configuration language", that might reflect
> my limits more than Forth's.

There are Scheme subsets like SIOD which are much smaller than either
Guile or Lua.  Forth is a little bit too contorted for my tastes, but
there was once an Emacs-like editor that used something close to it as
an extension language.  PostScript, of course, also strongly resembles
Forth.  A minimal Forth can be even smaller than SIOD, but SIOD is
pretty small and I'd probably use something like it in preference to
Forth in any but the tiniest environments.