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◈ALB Atlas

PostScript Alive

PostScript
KindProgramming language
Appeared1984
StatusAlive
CreatorWarnock & Geschke / Adobe
FamilyForth
Sourcewww.adobe.com ↗

A real stack-based programming language hiding inside a page-description format — the reason laser printers could be programmed, and PDF's ancestor.

Influenced by LISP Forth
Created by Charles Geschke John Warnock Adobe Systems

Warnock and Geschke's PostScript (1984) — a stack-based, Turing-complete page-description language — made the LaserWriter a computer that happened to print. Programs literally executed inside the printer.\n\nPDF is its flattened successor; Display PostScript powered NeXTSTEP's desktop. The 'language that prints' remains the strangest mainstream stack language.

Sources

  1. adobe.com/products/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript