In ColorForth, color is part of the syntax - it matters whether or not some text is white or green or yellow, in the same way that "//" matters in C or indentation matters in Python. What would the use of millions of indistinguishably-fine syntax cases be? What are benevolent uses of transparent source code?
OTOH, ColorForth is really cool, and admirable for its minimalism and effectiveness. A featureful port to a modern platform would be really fun to play with.
Well it started out as a joke, but then I'm afraid it's starting to making sense.
The blink attribute could be a control structure! Blinking text would only execute when you could see it, so you could write a blinking word "BEEP," and you'd hear it beeping on and off as it blinked!
Or you could change a "DO" loop into a "DON'T" loop by making it transparent.
And you could extend IF ELSE THEN to support a partially transparent MAYBE clause, whose probability of executing was proportional to its alpha channel.
When looking at the FORTH code in Github that Mitch linked to, I realized that Github supports colored syntax highlighting for FORTH! (Or at least it tries.)
But it colored the "Primitive control flow words" like if/do/while/etc red by mistake, because it didn't realize that particular code was actually defining those words instead of just using them.
It's pretty hard to write a code syntax colorizer for a language that does't actually have any syntax.
And all the millions of different colors would give people something more aesthetically pleasing to argue about than tabs versus spaces (two other transparently invisible but eternally controversial elements of programming language syntax).
In ColorForth, color is part of the syntax - it matters whether or not some text is white or green or yellow, in the same way that "//" matters in C or indentation matters in Python. What would the use of millions of indistinguishably-fine syntax cases be? What are benevolent uses of transparent source code?
OTOH, ColorForth is really cool, and admirable for its minimalism and effectiveness. A featureful port to a modern platform would be really fun to play with.