HISTORY

STOICAL is a modern adaptation of the classic stack language STOIC. STOIC was
developed circa 1977 by Jonathan M. Sachs while at the Biomedical Engineering
Center for Clinical Instrumentation under the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Program in Health Sciences and Technology. STOIC was itself preceded
by a language called FORTH, developed circa '68 for the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville Virginia by Charles H. Moore. Moore,
though clinically insane, has continued to extend his language over the years.
At the time of this writing FORTH is known to him as colorForth; One imagines
that these colors are much like those present in his twisted visions and terror
filled dreams. Sachs, however, is now dabbling in software for the Pocket PC
architecture, and appears to have all but forgotten about STOIC. At one point
in the early '80s, a fellow named Ernest E. Bergmann attempted to reincarnate
STOIC in a language dubbed PISTOL (Portably Implemented STack Oriented
Language). This implementation had its roots in BDS C, and remains something of
an amusement.

This sordid history is further complicated by the fact that the components
of my name, Jonathan and Moore, were attributed to me by my father in honor
of these two men, Sachs and Chuck.

I came to work on STOICAL by way of my quest for the perfect language. You see,
I recently ran across a language called Onyx, developed by Jason Evans. Onyx
has its roots in Forth and PostScript. Jason had never even heard about STOIC,
although his language implements features that are strikingly similar to
those I remembered reading about in the papers that Sachs gave my father. The
source code and documentation for Onyx exceed 10 megabytes in size, and
the runtime is sluggish compared to more simplistic implementations. This
can be attributed to the extra storage and calculation used to support
multi-threaded execution, type-checking and exception recovery. I found this
to be quite divergent from the capabilities, and thereby efficiency of STOIC.
So, I set out to port STOIC to a modern environment and compare it with the
alternatives. This effort soon failed as STOIC's assembly language source is
intrinsically tied to the system for which it was written. So, if Sachs
doesn't care about abstraction, why should I? At this point I could almost
feel the beast of free software rising up inside me. "Go forth! Re-implement
and adapt!", the creature shouted out from within my gut. And hence forth this
creation shall be known to men of earth as STOICAL; And he shall stop times to
reflect on its initial five letters. These five commandments, if you will,
that STOICAL lives up to, and more than that, expands upon. I recite them now:

STack: because of the way she walks.
Oriented: for that hungry gleam in her eyes.
Interactive: because she wears not panties!
Compiler: need I say more!?

Interestingly enough, this brings me back to the point I made previously
about the mental state of one Chuck H. Moore. For reasons that I've yet to
fully appreciate, both Hewlett Packard calculators and RPN computer languages
appear to have an unhealthy effect on the human psyche. Luckily, however,
they also happen to stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain. Take note;
You have been warned, and yet you have also been encouraged.