About the language

It starts with BURP.

Wireless world published a magazine article for a Z80 computer sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s. What was odd about this is that it had a maths coprocessor - the MM57109.

Whoever wrote the BASIC for this had decided to offload the arithmetic onto the co-processor. But nothing else.

So it looked a bit odd. Sort of half and half. LET A = B C + 2 * sort of thing. But there wasn't much consistency. Comparisons were still done by IF A=4 THEN for example, when perhaps it should have been IF A 4 = THEN.

Interesting though. While tinkering around I came across something not dissimilar but slightly more consistent. A language called "RPL" written by a chap called Tim Stryker in the early 1980s, which ran on the Commodore PET.

This is a bit different. It's the same basic sort of idea, but it's more like FORTH.

Interestingly, it is integrated as a compiler into BASIC. So you edited it using BASIC and ran a (small) compiler. It was possible to use routines in BASIC.

It looks like FORTH in many ways, and not others. It has a slightly mangled syntax ; because you type it in in BASIC it has to live with the Microsoft BASIC Parser. It has "Goto" for loops. It also doesn't have any of the scaffolding stuff that you can do in FORTH - so you can't create words that compile - you'd have to modify the compiler to do that.

RPL/PET Manual

http://www.portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=larry:comp:flash_attack:fa-rplmaual.pdf

RPL/PET Discussion about it

https://portcommodore.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=larry:comp:flash_attack:flash_attack_notes