wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (12/06/90)
My mind boggles at the amount of trouble people seem to be willing to go to in order to save $10 on a copy of Basis. In fact, it's probably not a net savings of $10, because it probably costs more than $10 to print the file. Of course, it may be that somebody else is paying for the printer paper/ink/toner/maintenance and the electronic transmission costs. Considering how much work was required to transport the Basis source code from the PC version of MS Word to the Mac version of MS Word, I would suspect that it would take at least several hours to get a clean translation to some other format. A competent programmer's time is probably worth $50 minimum (burdened cost), which translates to say a couple of hundred dollars per translation format. Amortize that over the (probably small) number of people who want that particular format. $10 starts to look pretty cheap, not even considering the >$10 cost of actually printing it. If you want it in a hurry, you can send the money in advance, and get the document within a few days of when it is ready. Of course, it will cost another $10 for overseas airmail, but it's still a good deal. The "searching" problem is greatly alleviated by the excellent concordance that comes with each Basis (kudos to Greg Bailey). Mitch
wmb@ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (04/01/91)
> ANS Forth Basis15 in Microsoft RTF format. This document (BASIS15)
Well, after all the discussion about getting Basis out to the community
in a timely fashion, it has finally happened. I'm a TC member, and I
don't have my printed copy of Basis 15 yet (of course, if it is in my
mailbox tomorrow, I may have it before anybody succeeds in printing it
from the on-line RTF document :-).
It's ironic that this finally happened now that the process is nearing
its close, but it did happen. I think this bodes well for the utility
of electronic communication in future standards efforts. The process
of interconnecting the various networks is accelerating, and I have
great hopes for the future in this area.
Mitchwmb@ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (04/01/91)
Also on the subject of the timely on-line Basis, I would like to add a note of thanks to the people whose volunteer efforts made this possible. It may seem like a trivial thing, but from my vantage point on the ANS Forth committee, I can assure everyone that the documentation editors put in a Herculean effort to prepare the document in its several forms. : 3cheers 3 0 do ." Hip, hip, hooray" cr loop ; 3cheers (My system can do this without the colon definition. Can yours? If not, read my paper in FORML '87 or John Hayes' article in a recent Forth Dimensions). Mitch Bradley