Moore, Charles H.

Charles Havice Moore II (born 9 September 1938), better known as Chuck Moore, is an American computer engineer and programmer who invented the Forth programming language in 1968. He cofounded FORTH, Inc., with Elizabeth Rather in 1971 and continued to evolve the language with an emphasis on simplicity. Beginning in the early 1980s, Moore shifted focus to designing stack machines in hardware conjoined with Forth-like languages to run on them. He developed the Novix NC4000 and ShBoom (which evolved into the Ignite processor), then the minimal instruction set MuP21, and i21. He distanced himself from Forth proper, which by then had an official standard, and built ever more minimalist stack languages to support his own needs, particularly processor design. In the early 1990s, he implemented a system called OK for direct editing of x86 machine code without a compiler or assembler. He changed direction with colorForth, which uses internal tokens in the source code to guide a tiny compiler. He chose to visualize these tokens as different colors in a program, so code to be compiled and code to be interpreted are displayed distinctly. In the 2000s he created a series of low-power chips, marketed by GreenArrays, containing up to 144 individual stack processors.