Shelta is a minimal Forth-like language. It has barely any semantics of its own; it relies on inline machine code to write anything resembling an actual program in it.

In the spirit of compilers for languages such as FALSE and brainfuck, a Shelta-to-8086 compiler was implemented (with some help from Ben Olmstead) as an MS-DOS .COM executable containing less than 512 bytes of 80286 machine code.

What's more, it has also been bootstrapped — that is to say, a Shelta compiler was written in Shelta, which was compiled with the original compiler, and then compiled again with the resulting compiler, producing a wholly self-hosted executable.

For more information, see the files in the doc directory of this distribution.