A niche programming language originally designed for real-time control of telescopes. An ANSI standard since 1994 (X3.215). Forth has a simple syntax and many keywords, unlike C/C++ and similar languages, which are the opposite. Forth programs are made up of many small procedures, and math is via RPN. These procedures are compiled, though Forth has no compiler in the traditional sense. Forth is essentially just a collection of procedures, called words, and an interpreter. Nowadays, Forth is used primarily to test and debug hardware and bring up systems. Only about 2% of the subscribers of Embedded Systems Programming reported using Forth regularly in a 2001 survey. Interestingly, some Unix workstations boot a small Forth interpreter before the rest of the operating system. One such environment is Sun's Open Boot, which provides Forth programming capabilities right out of ROM and a small bootloader that enables the operating system to be manually or automatically loaded and run from a disk drive or over a network. IEEE 1275 defines a standard based on Open Boot. [ more