info-mac@utcsrgv.UUCP (info-mac) (05/24/84)
Date: Mon 21 May 84 15:22:01-PDT From: uw-beaver!Stewart.French@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA Subject: MacForth Impressions Sender: uw-beaver!SFRENCH@USC-ECLB.ARPA To: info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA Reply-To: SFRENCH@USC-ECLB.ARPA Hello everyone, I purchased (and received) MacForth a couple of weeks ago. I am not a Forth hacker. I am learning this stuff as I go. With this in mind I will now give you my initial impressions of MacForth: 1. It is robust. There seems to be a great many "words" to choose from to perform needed operations. There are so many that it is difficult to figure out which ones to use to gain the most efficiency! 2. The on-line tutorial is totally inadequate! And, there is no (good) Forth information supplied with the system. You better know it before you start or go get a good book on Forth when you start or you will be very frustrated. 3. The system is extremely easy to crash. I crash it all the time and have to reboot (the bomb appears, etc..) This is very annoying. I haven't trashed a disk yet, and that is good. 4. The functions that I want to use the most TExxxxx and the words associated with the serial ports and control areas of windows are not supported in level 1 ! This is most annoying, especially since these functions are used in the editor and the demo programs. I have to hack trying everything and anything, and end crashing the system more often than not. 5. The file system interface seems to have some bugs in it. I have tried opening text files reading in lines and putting them on the screen (a small "type" command.) The interface seems to get an eof after the first line when a word is compiled then executed, but works correctly when each word (in the compiled word) is interpreted. I have been unable to figure a work-around to this problem yet... 6. The documentation I got did not match the system I was supplied. 7. CSI is very responsive to problems. I talked with a fellow named Richard Alexander. He was very willing to help me with any problem I had. Overall, I feel like this system will be very nice when the bugs are ironed out. It bothers me when a company markets an alpha or beta release of a product (and makes us pay for it.) But this seems to be prevalent any more... too bad. I am looking forward to Level 2 (and the bug fixes for Level 1.) Stewart French SFRENCH @ USC-ECLB.ARPA Texas Instruments 214-462-5393 (for a little while longer) -------