I have followed with considerable interest, the thread 'The Promise of FORTH'
started by Johan Thomas. Much has been made of FORTH's perceived
shortcomings but as these are mostly inherent, there is little likelihood
that any significant changes can be made. That said, I think most here
would like to see a thriving Forth community. In order for that to happen,
the first thing is to get the existence of the language into the
consciousness of the general programming community. John Doty's complaint
that there is no body of shared Forth code reflects that. The second thing
is to identify those strengths of Forth that would make it attractive to
potential users and somehow getting the word out.

From my point of view, the attractive features of FORTH are; first that it
is an incremental compiler, second that it incorporates an assembler, and
third it is extensible. Back at the beginning of...

"Robert Miller" compmore.net> wrote:

Forth is extensible. You can do anything you want with it, if you want
to bother to do the programming. But you can't force other Forth
programmers to do it your way, unless you're the boss. So if you want
objects, Forth has lots of object systems. If you want locals, they're
there. If you want pretty-printed source code, with careful indenting,
you can write that way or you can write your text editor in Forth to do
it for you, or you can write a Forth routine to do it to your source
code after it's written. You can have anything you want. But after you
make it work your way, it isn't exactly Forth. Because you haven't
forced everybody else to do it too.

Robert Miller wrote:

[%%X]

For the even older hands, paper tape might have seemed like a luxury. One
system I have brought up involved 4k of machine code entered on switches
and latched into the memory locations (ran for 25 years with no errors).

[%%X]

On Mar 27, 6:47 pm, Jonah Thomas gmail.com> wrote:

... "it isn't exactly Forth, unless you've made it possible for anyone
else to do it too."

If its available to anyone who wants it (within the intrinsic
constraints of the area of application), then its still exactly Forth.

That is, if its strictly a matter of:

REQUIRE tools52.fs

[algo using servers/panel:file tools/strings:floats:arrays
...

...
algo]

and the [algo interpreter hook is one of the things that tools52.fs
ensures is available, then that's Forth to the extent that tools52.fs
is.

On Mar 27, 12:01 pm, "Robert Miller" compmore.net> wrote:

More libraries would be nice, but there's usually not much incentive
to reimplement C-based wheels in Forth when C bindings are available.
A C binding standard would be very useful, IMHO.

I would like to see Forth Inc put out more press releases in the
electronics trade journals, since it doesn't cost anything to do so
and any new release of SwiftX is an excuse to send out a press
release.

Bruce McFarling netscape.net> wrote:

....

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:01:14 -0400, Robert Miller wrote:

I see it as the prize of leaving the responsibility of generating effective
code to a virtuel mashine to the programmer person, that forth is
difficult.

Stack visualisation is a training matter, and comments to definitions makes
it clear what arguments is used, but the use of definitions without any
forced parameter naming or chekking, is a very much weaker abstraction
support than the common named variable/parameter paragdigm used in other
languages.

Hi
One of the complaints I see often is the lack
of type checking.
I can't recall when I had an error in my code
related to incorrect use of type. Still, it is
considered a major problem with Forth?
Dwight

dkelvey@hotmail.com wrote:

The issue isn't errors, which generally don't survive the first
interactive test. The issue is vocabulary bloat and user confusion.

--
John Doty, Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd.
http://www.noqsi.com/

On Mar 27, 10:15 pm, Jonah Thomas gmail.com> wrote:

Aha, and thus Dr. Ting's reference to footsteps in an empty valley.

My distinction here is different. A source text is a member of
Forth society to the extent that it itself is Forth, including
sources in Forth that you can download and put into a place
where it can find it and include or require it from within
Forth.

Given Forth's extreme range of implementations, where you can
find sets of implementations that are mutually exclusive in
terms of what they make of a given source, there is no such
thing as a source text that is generically Forth.

For a few limited source texts, its possible to say that they
are members of the Forth-94 source text society.

Every working source text is a member of the source text
society for the implementation they were programmed on.