anderson@uwvax.UUCP (05/27/84)
There was a recent article that refered to an implementation of Forth-83 residing on simtel20. I can ftp there no problem, but I don't know the path name for the file. Does anyone have this, and more generally does anyone have or know how to get a list of the publicly-accessible directories there? Thanks -- David Anderson (uwvax!anderson)
wmb@sun.UUCP (05/29/84)
Forth-83 is on Simtel-20 in MICRO:<CPM.FORTH-83> I don't know how to get an up-to-date list of accessible stuff; I have saved some of the Simtel-20 lists that have been posted to the USENET in the past, but they aren't complete, as witnessed by the lack of mention of the FORTH-83 stuff (which I know about from a specific announcement about Forth-83). BTW, a new release of Forth-83 is out as of last month. There are a few changes from the release on Simtel-20, but nothing earth-shaking. (I have this from the "horse's mouth". The author of Forth-83 is a friend of mine). Forth-83 seems to be catching on. There is a book out now that describes it - Forth Tools, by Anita Anderson and Martin Tracy. A few months ago, I converted all of my Forth code from Forth-79 to Forth-83. It was really easy; almost all of the necessary changes involved subtracting 1 from an argument to PICK, looking for ticks's ( ' ) and either deleting a following "CFA" or adding ">BODY" as the situation demanded, and changing "NOT" to "0=". I don't claim that this is all that has to change in every situation, but these three changes take care of the lion's share of the differences. I am very happy with F83. I found the 79-standard to be quite annoying when I attempted to do real work with it, but I'm having a much better time with the 83-standard. Name-droppingly yours, Mitch Bradley