ir230@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (john wavrik) (04/24/91)
Comma Daniel Sobral writes, > This is a small reply to a long message from John J Wavrik. What I > think is that he's comparing ANS Forth with another Forth that we > currently use. I would like to know what Forth we currently use. There is, of course, no way that I can tell this for any particular person. Until you posted your message I had no way of knowing which version of Forth you currently use. Now you have told me it is F-PC. For other people it will be F83, MMS-Forth, etc. The "Forth that we currently use" depends on the person. No matter which Forth you currently use, you will be faced with the problem I discussed in my last article (assuming you are interested in writing portable Forth): (1) You will have to determine what parts of current code need to be changed. (2) You will have to know how to change them. I can guarantee that almost any significant application you have written in F-PC will crash if you try to run it without change on an arbitrary system picked at random from existing versions of Forth. I can also guarantee that almost any significant application you have now will crash on a future system written in compliance with the proposed ANSI standards. ---------------- Within the past 6 years, Forth has changed itself. It was once a language that had a reputation for allowing amazing things to be done portably. Mitch Bradley has documented its decline to a state in which outsiders say "If you want to do anything significant in Forth, you have to throw portability out the window". It is very sad -- this decline in portability is a major factor preventing Forth from being marketable. A restoration of portability is extremely important. A good Standard with clearly specified words is vital for the survival of Forth. IF MY POSTINGS HAVE EVER HAVE GIVEN ANYONE THE IMPRESSION THAT I AM AGAINST STANDARDS -- LET ME ASSURE THEM OTHERWISE. A good Standard is vital for the survival of Forth -- a bad Standard will be its downfall. A good Standard deserves the support of everyone concerned with the survival of Forth. > I, > for example, use TCOM and F-PC 3.53, both from the same guy, and > distributed in a same package... and I can't use comma as John J > Wavrik has said we use in neither one. The uses I gave of comma are perfectly common and historically correct. You can find comma used in these ways in published code (Forth Dimensions, proceedings of Forth conferences, JFAR, etc.) Most users do not have to go much further than the source code of their systems to find examples of all three. Of the three uses of comma, F-PC uses comma for one of them and X, for the other two ( X, is used for storing execution and branch addresses). You can find examples of each of these uses with the REF utility in your F-PC system. John J Wavrik jjwavrik@ucsd.edu Dept of Math C-012 Univ of Calif - San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093
EBERBERS%yubgef51@PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU (____ Zarko Berberski ____) (04/25/91)
A long posting can be interesting or boring but this one
simply made me sick.
In computer science (and programming as its applied part)
it is well known what the word "semantics" mean and if Mr. Warvik
have spent at least come smaal time browsing through even some very
basic c.s. litherature then he certainly wouldn't try to enforce
a quite nonsense meaning to the same word and wase both net and
our time.
You can imagine my horror when I've seen another posting
by the same author and with the same name :-) Fortunately this
one was much shorter but as missleading as the previous. Mr.
Warvik guarantees us that any significan application we have now
will crash on future ANSI Forth system. The same statement can
can be given FOR ANY POPULAR PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE including C
since significant applications always must use system-specefic
resouces it they are to be good. Even quite simple C programms
may need changes if things like (sizeof int) are important for
their corectness. Not to mention Fortran EQUIVALENCE-a and
porting from linear-memory to segmented-memory sytems. So, we
have another nonsenses.
Do we really have to be bugged with tons of nonsense just
because somebody thinks that he have created the world and knows
better then all of us what are the "real" meanings of the words
and what is the "essence" of portability ?
Zarko Berberski EBERBERS@YUBGEF51.bitnet