{Grasshopper, capitalization in subject line significant :}

What is so right with Forth that it *OVERRIDES* ALL negative comments?

Obviously the : ; pair.
What other language morphs to match the "real" world so well in a such
well defined manner?

What's wrong with c.l.f. ?

/begin *RANT*
A close relative of N.I.H. Syndrome.

e g
I'm interested in a variety of problems ranging from subsets of speech
recognition to sources of GPS errors and their significance.

What do they have in common?
Someone else has compiled raw data. It's available in ASCII format.
That requires me to parse it.
I doubt anyone would claim string handling as a Forth forte.

I've quit asking questions on c.l.f. as typical answer has been

"DON'T DO THAT"

/end *RANT*

Richard Owlett atlascomm.net> writes Re: What's right with FORTH and wrong with c.l.f.
[..]

I doubt that anybody has discouraged you to solve the *problem*.
They probably advised you to solve it in a way that does not involve
(a specific way of) string handling. E.g. if the input is

12 apestaart 3456 kippekot 18 hondehok -771

the numbers can be fetched by string parsing and >NUMBER.

But also with

: apestaart ; : kippekot ; : hondehok ; PARSE-NAME EVALUATE

Without specific details it is not easy to give advise.

On Apr 30, 5:14 pm, Richard Owlett atlascomm.net> wrote:

Richard Owlett atlascomm.net> wrote:

My experience has been somewhat different.

Various people are interested in string hasndling with Forth. In general
each of them prefers his own methods, but I've seen them compare notes
and learn from each other.

mhx@iae.nl (Marcel Hendrix) wrote Re: What's right with FORTH and wrong with c.l.f.
[..]

Free associations .. Would it be nice to have a special type of VOCABULARY
which does *not* insist on a direct string match, but accepts
patterns (vectored FIND)? We could then define not only
words with names, but also words with names that match a certain
pattern. Let's say we can do that with "::" instead of ":".

VOCABULARY myapp myapp DEFINITIONS
S" [a-zA-Z]+" :: ( noop ) ;
PREVIOUS DEFINITIONS
( you must be careful not to leave myapp in the normal search order :-)

12 apestaart 3456 kippekot 18 hondehok -771

would now be equivalent to

12 3456 18 -771

It's a free association, but still this

should be

VOCABULARY myapp myapp DEFINITIONS
S" ," :: ( noop ) ;
S~ "[a-zA-Z]+"~ :: last-name 1- 1 /STRING 2DUP $CREATE ( magic1 ) , 2DUP ( magic2 ) , ;
PREVIOUS DEFINITIONS

Sorry,

-marcel

On Apr 30, 11:14 pm, Richard Owlett atlascomm.net> wrote:

I do. Sure, you need some extra words, but I do actually think that
string handling is one of the strengths of Forth. Some feats I've done
in 4tH (my Forth):
- Parsing Cisco XML files without any extra (external) libs;
- Patching 4tH source files with extra commands without adding any
special markers;
- Eliza (I've not been the only one), text adventure game.

I've equivalents of Basic string handling (start/count), ZX string
handling (start/end), but I rarely seem to use them. /STRING. 1-, CHOP
and BOUNDS are much handier tools in everyday use. And yes, I got
equivalents for substring replacement and substring deletion as well.
Parsing files is unmatched in Forth/4tH. Much easier and versatile
than e.g. C.

I'd never believe for twenty years I'd say this but I do.

Hans

"The Beez'" bigfoot.com> wrote:

The weakness I see is concatenating strings. You can use ALLOCATE and
depend on the system that provides ALLOCATE to do decent garbage
collection. Or you can copy both strings at HERE and trust you'll be
able to -ALLOT the space at the right time.

If the point is to send the string to a file or a pipe etc, you don't
have to concatenate strings, just send all the parts in the right order.
You can get by sending the first part as soon as you know it, and then
you don't have to keep track of it.

In article <39232322183559@frunobulax.edu>, Marcel Hendrix wrote:

Do I see a slight influence of my style of names in examples ?
:-)

Groetjes Albert

In article <08011322183559@frunobulax.edu>, Marcel Hendrix wrote: