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Programming language dialect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A dialect of a programming language is a (relatively small) variation or extension of the language that does not change its intrinsic nature. With languages such as Scheme and Forth, standards may be considered insufficient, inadequate or even illegitimate by implementors, so often they will deviate from the standard, making a new dialect. In other cases, a dialect is created for use in a domain-specific language, often a subset. In the Lisp world, most languages that use basic S-expression syntax and Lisp-like semantics are considered Lisp dialects, even though they vary wildly, as do, say, Bigloo Scheme and newLISP. It is not uncommon for one language to have several dialects, this can make it quite hard for a newbie to find the right tutorial. The BASIC programming language has so many dialects that there is a compiler for virtually every computer system on the planet.
The explosion of Forth dialects led to the saying "If you've seen one Forth... you've seen one Forth."
