STOICAL was inspired by the classic stack language STOIC. STOIC was developed
circa 1977 by Jonathan M. Sachs while at the Biomedical Engineering Center for
Clinical Instrumentation under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Program in Health Sciences and Technology. STOIC was itself preceded by a
language called FORTH, developed circa '68 for the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory in Charlottesville Virginia by Charles H. Moore. Moore, though
clinically insane, has continued to extend his language over the years.  At the
time of this writing FORTH is known to him as colorForth; One imagines that
these colors are much like those present in his twisted visions and terror
filled dreams. Sachs, however, is now dabbling in software for the Pocket PC
architecture, and appears to have all but forgotten about STOIC. At one point
in the early '80s, a fellow named Ernest E. Bergmann attempted to reincarnate
STOIC in a language dubbed PISTOL (Portably Implemented STack Oriented
Language). This implementation had its roots in BDS C, and remains something of
an amusement.

STOICAL is vastly different from its predecessors. Primarily because so much
has changed since the decades ago that they were developed.  Today STOICAL is
powerful and general enough to be used as a high performance replacement for
semi-compiled and interpreted languages like Perl, Python, SED and Awk. And
because of STOICAL's advanced support for networking and concurrent threads of
execution, it can be used to write efficient long-running servers and daemons
that would normally need to be written in C. The intent here is not to explore
the intricacies of archaic systems, but to create a new and modern language,
well suited to the world as it exists today. STOICAL might therefore be more
accurately represented by the recursive acronym SINS, SINS Is Not STOIC, but
this word has a remarkable stigma attached to it ;-)

For reasons that I've yet to fully appreciate, both Hewlett Packard calculators
and Reverse Polish computer languages appear to have an unhealthy effect on the
human psyche. Luckily, however, they also happen to stimulate the pleasure
centers of the brain. Take note; You have been warned, and yet you have also
been encouraged.

Above and beyond the grace and efficiency of its syntax, STOICAL
provides several additional features that make it a truly powerful
tool in any programmer's arsenal. Among these are:

Extensibility
	
	This may be something of a buzz word these days, but Forth like
	languages have been extensible from their very beginning. To understand
	what this means you must first consider a language that is not
	extensible. We shall take C to be an example. Though it is true that
	you can define additional functions or procedures in C, you cannot
	extend the language itself. The syntax and operators are fixed and
	unyielding. In an extensible language, however, all of these things are
	liquid, and may be altered at any time. In STOICAL, the programmer may
	define his program as a little language in its own right.	

Interactivity

	STOICAL, like its predecessor, is completely interactive.  It
	incrementally compiles and executes instructions and definitions as you
	enter them. This allows for easy testing and development of
	applications. And because of its speed you don't have to suffer for
	this convenience.

Cooperation
	
	Many people in my circles seem to be of the opinion that all Reverse
	Polish languages must, by very definition, also be their own operating
	system*. This is foolish. I like my operating system, and I like other
	computer languages. Moreover, I like them all to interact in an
	intelligent and useful way. It is for this reason that STOICAL strives
	to exploit the operating system and environment in any way that it can.

	* - The most notable exception being Jason Evans and his Onyx
	extension language.

Networking

	For the past 10 years a large percentage of computer programs have had
	to deal with the interconnection of systems in some way.  Currently,
	nearly every application must deal with the extreme interconnection
	known as the Internet. To facilitate this, STOICAL supports socket
	based networking in a straight forward, familiar and empowering
	fashion.
	
POSIX Threading

	Obviously, networking isn't of much use without concurrency of some
	kind, and threads are the best form of concurrency made available by
	the operating system. STOICAL makes handling multiplicity uncommonly
	simple.

POSIX Regular Expressions

	STOICAL integrates support for the POSIX Regular Expression (regex)
	pattern matching facility, a truly striking feature for a stack based
	language. In fact, regex's are more integrated with STOICAL than they
	are with languages specially designed for them, such as Perl.

Associative Arrays (Hash Tables)

	This powerful programming tool is overlooked by far too many languages.
	Associative arrays are one of those features that most languages never
	provide, even though you really must have them to write anything of
	consequence. Oddly, almost all modern compilers use associative arrays
	internally, to store their symbol table data. In any event, STOICAL
	integrates hash table based associative arrays seamlessly with the
	language; Another ground breaking feature in the world of RPN.

Passive Garbage Collection

	Many modern, dynamic languages put a great deal of effort into active,
	mark and sweep or refference count garbage collection algorithms and
	implementations. The design of some of these languages makes this
	necessary, because the object name space is an infinite resource.
	However, in a stack based language the name space is replaced by a
	finite store, quite obviously referred to as 'the stack'. Because this
	stack can only hold a specific number of items at any one time, garbage
	collection becomes a simple matter of trust. The programmer trusts the
	language not to free his memory until a reasonable amount of activity
	has taken place on the stack. Garbage collection is implemented
	internally as a FIFO stack, which is, unlike the parameter stack,
	infinite. However, only the topmost X elements of this stack ever have
	actual storage allocated to them. This fits well with normal usage
	patterns of the language. If the programmer needs a dynamic object to
	remain permanently, he simply does the obvious thing, and files it into
	the dictionary.  Currently, nameless, non constant strings are the only
	dynamically allocated objects in the language; The dictionary grows and
	shrinks dynamically, but it isn't an object, and doesn't require
	garbage collection.
	
Passive Type-checking

	Passive type-checking means that only words which desire type-checking
	will incur any performance penalty, and even then the extra computation
	is miniscule. The type-checking system also allows word (operator)
	overloading. This is why you can use the word + (plus) to add figures,
	as well as to concatenate strings.
	
Floating Point Arithmetic

	Anyone who has used a Forth system in the past knows what a headache it
	can be to do floating point calculations. In STOICAL this is completely
	transparent, as floats and integers occupy the same stack and behave
	identically.

More

	Of course, it is 4:00 in the morning right now, and I cannot be
	expected to remember every exciting little detail.  Just know that you
	will come to appreciate many new things about language in time, and
	likely discover features that even I have overlooked.